#conference-booking-software

[hurricane-eggbeater]

my brother has been talking about working in florida for the winter and my family is collectively reacting as if he announced he’s moving to khartoum

[mostlysignssomeportents]

They're handing out patents for "inventions" that don't exist

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

Patent trolls produce nothing except lawsuits. Unlike real capitalist enterprises, a patent troll does not “practice” the art in its patent portfolio — it seeks out productive enterprises that are making things that real people use, and then uses legal threats to extract rents from them.

One of the most prolific patent trolls of the twenty-first century is Landmark Technology, whose U.S. Patent №7,010,508 nominally covers virtually anything you might do in the course of operating an online business: having a homepage, letting a customer login to your site, or having pages where customers can view and order products.

Landmark shook down more than a thousand productive businesses for $65,000 license-fees it demanded on threat of a patent lawsuit.

But that reign of terror is almost certainly over. When Landmark tried to get $65,000 out of Binders.com, the victim’s owner, NAPCO, went to court to invalidate Landmark’s patent, which never should have issued.

A North Carolina court agreed, and killed Landmark’s patent. Landmark faces further punishments in Washington State, where the attorney general has sued the company for violating state consumer protection laws in a case that has been removed to federal court.

Landmark’s patent contains “means-plus-function” claims. These a rentier’s superweapon, in which a patent can lay a claim over an invention without inventing or describing it. These claims are almost entirely used in software patents, something that has been blessed by the Federal Circuit, America’s most authoritative patent court.

A means-plus-function patent lets an “inventor” patent something they don’t know how to do. If these patents applied to pharma, a company could get a patent on “an arrangement of atoms that cure cancer,” without specifying that arrangement of atoms. Anyone who actually did cure cancer would have to pay rent to the patent-holder.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[cyberstudious]

✨ 📖 ✏️ studyblr masterpost jam ✏️ 📖 ✨

📌 what is this?

this is a masterpost jam, like a game jam or a hackathon or a writing challenge, but for creating masterposts! the goal is to share knowledge and resources, as well as connect with other cool folks on tumblr! this challenge was born out of the studyblr community, but anyone who loves learning is welcome to participate. each day, share a masterpost following the prompts below and tag your posts with the hashtag #studyblrmasterpostjam so we can all reblog them and share the love <3

🗓️ when is this happening?

the main challenge will run August 12th through August 18th, although you're welcome to participate on your own timeline :)

✨ everyone is encouraged to participate in whatever way is comfortable!

you don't have to be an academic or a professional! tell us about your special interest, a favorite hobby or craft, or something else that you like learning about!

even if you're a beginner, you still have a valuable perspective that's worth sharing (and writing posts for this challenge is a great way to do some research and learn!).

you don't have to do all of the days or share posts on the "right" day! pick and choose your faves if you want, combine things, and take as long as you need to put them together.

you don't have to make super long posts! if you have a single resource or tip to share, please do and we will appreciate it all the same <3

if you don't want to write any posts, you can still participate by reading posts that other people make and reblogging them so we can all learn from each other!

please feel free to interpret the prompts below in your own way and expand upon them! there are so many different topics out there and the questions I've written probably don't make sense for some of them, so take what makes sense and use the rest as inspiration!

✏️ prompts

[monday, august 12th] an intro to your topic or field of study

how would you describe this topic to someone who has never heard of it? what careers are available? what professional organizations/conferences are big? what journals do academics publish in? what are the big questions, goals, or challenges? what are the sub-fields/sub-topics/areas of specialization? what are some resources for learning about the field itself?

2. [tuesday, august 13th] books

textbooks, fiction that relates to the field, inspiring memoirs, biographies, art books, graphic novels, audiobooks… anything that you think is relevant to your topic and helpful!

3. [wednesday, august 14th] free resources

online things! resources that you might be able to get from your library! and and all ways to learn/study/practice that don't require money - feel free to get creative here and come up with some cool ideas beyond just links to websites!

4. [thursday, august 15th] notable figures

who has made important contributions to the field? is there anyone who made big contributions in the past that are now outdated or incorrect? who has done great things but been overlooked because of racism/sexism/ableism/etc.? who is making interesting contributions today? is there anyone in the field that you look up to? this is a great time to do some research if you don't already have some notable figures in mind!

5. [friday, august 16th] study tips

what are your favorite tips and ways to study this topic? are there lots of things you need to memorize or tricky concepts that are hard to understand at first? is there a skill that requires lots of practice? tell us about it and how you approach it!

6. [saturday, august 17th] tools of the trade

do you work with software? lab equipment? art supplies? your favorite pen and notebook? certain analysis frameworks or processes? tell us about them!

7. [sunday, august 18th] beginner's guide

what resources were most helpful when you were a beginner? what are the important concepts/techniques to start with? are there any prerequisite skills? also, include links to your previous masterposts!

remember to tag your posts with #studyblrmasterpostjam! if you want to participate, feel free to reblog this to spread the word. I'll see y'all on August 12th for the first masterpost!

[anarcho-physicist]

i helped* write a new physics textbook and it has a cool (and free) website: softmatterbook.online

*a little bit. The vast majority of the book was written by van Saarloos, Vitelli, and Zeravcic, but a whole bunch of people contributed little bits of writing (myself included) and are credited in the preface.

This book is an accumulation of some of the most fundamental results in soft matter physics, many of which were first discovered or derived very recently. The website hosts a bunch of extra resources (videos, notes, demos, etc.) sorted by the chapters of the book:

Fluid Dynamics

Elasticity

Brownian Motion

Colloids

Polymers

Liquid Crystals

Interfaces, Surfaces, & Membranes

Pattern Formation out of Equilibrium

Active Matter

From Designing Matter to Mimicking Life

It also lists a whole bunch of labs all around the world that are studying the sorts of systems described in the book, as well as mailing lists you can sign up for, conferences, workshops, youtube channels, and software packages. I'm absolutely biased (see below) but I think it's a really great resource for anybody interested in soft matter!

I spent the first year of my PhD helping to put this thing together. I translated research papers into problems, hunted for typos, and wrote most of the solutions in the instructor's manual. I don't make any money off the book sales (my PI told me they made it available for as cheap of a price as the publisher would allow), but my PhD stipend was funded for the year to work on this thing instead of having to TA.

I was ridiculously lucky to get the chance to work on this thing, even if at times it felt like learning how the academic sausage gets made.

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

[meg2md]

Operation: Trying To Get My Shit Together

It's my last week of nights, but like I said before, even though it's ass and I'm constantly in a state of existential dread, the hours are considerably better than normal day shift hours and I actually have a relative ton of free time as long as the floor isn't on fire and I'm not expecting transports. I read through all 41 volumes of Berserk in the past 3 weeks and have (almost) recovered from the emotional trauma it inflicted on me, and now I have one week left and no hyperfixations that call me too strongly. So I guess I can work on getting my life together lol.

Academic responsibilities:

M&M - draft due Tues, about half done

CREOG - test in January

ACOG - need to make AROM demos and borrow some amnihooks/FSEs, e-mail about borrowing CE demos, end of Oct

M3 surgical skills - submit simulation center form!!!!, next month

Urogyn - prepare for surgical cases next block by reading/watching videos, next week

Conferences: book hotels, flights; schedule reimbursement - this month

Research: meet about SDOH study paper; log into Athena to prep for data collection for Sedation project; touch base with JC about if AI study going anywhere

Fellowship: app in May, the biggest things are figuring out when/how to ask for LOR and drafting a personal statement. And then hoping my extracurriculars and research are enough :( also potentially an away rotation for end of March/early April - need to meet with MIGS ppl next week to discuss next steps

But the most stressful thing that's been weighing on me for MONTHS is my finances and disorganized spending. This week I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to get my budget it order. I can't even imagine how much my stress levels will improve if I don't have this crushing dread about my finances hanging over my head. This includes

Figuring out loans and how/when to pay them back

Budgeting software (I used YNAB previously)

Paying back my friend who lent me money for vet bills

Calling insurance to see why therapy costs so freaking much

My spending has been out of control!!!! It is like, the absolute worst, most damaging symptom of my ADHD that I don't have a good handle on yet, especially when I'm so dysregulated from nights. I thought I could work on it over the weekend but alllllll my limited, limited energy was spent on basic self-care (laundry, dishes, cleaning floor) and I had NOTHING left.

Anyway. Today is for starting on the budget journey and working on M&M. Maybe I'll log into YNAB and reset some things and just start over. ho hum

I'm just..... so beaten down, so tired. I have so much existential angst. Like idk that I'd want to do anything other than medicine in my life, but like..... what's the point of living ? Lol. Is this all there is? I don't have a partner, I don't have many friends near here. I don't want to not be alive but I like, need a reason to live

:')

[eretzyisrael]

Good News From Israel

In the 20th Sep 23 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

Israeli AI system identifies thousands of new effective combination cancer therapies.

Two examples of Israel’s inclusive army.

Israelis are helping survivors of the earthquake in Morocco.

More Israeli breakthroughs to prevent global hunger.

Israel is “on the global map” for trade links, electricity, and (we hope) peace.

Israeli innovations will protect the vulnerable in Oklahoma and Japan.

The “People of the Book” has a new National library.

Muslims and Jews pray together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Read More: Good News From Israel

The Jewish New Year is a very appropriate time to celebrate more new exciting Israeli life-changing innovations and activities. These include new ways to combine cancer treatments to increase effectiveness with less side-effects. And a new Israeli treatment for MS is now available on-line. The US FDA have approved new Israeli software to guide cancer surgery and a new Israeli ultrasound-guided device to take biopsies. Meanwhile, Europe is funding trials of a new Israeli formula for feeding premature newborns. There's a new sign-language tour of Jerusalem's Tower of David; a new home for lone soldiers; the first visit to Israel by the UK's latest Foreign Minister; and the first official Israeli delegation to a conference in Saudi Arabia. Israelis have found new ways to communicate with plants; new ways to extract milk proteins from mushrooms and to generate new proteins using biotechnology; new ways to motivate children at school; and new protective fireproof uniforms. Recent diplomatic announcements opens up the prospect of a new age where Israel provides natural gas and electricity to Europe and becomes the center of a new trade route linking Europe, the Middle East and India. Meanwhile, numerous new business ventures have just been launched by Israeli startups. Jerusalem, the eternal city, continues to be renewed as the rebuilt Tiferet synagogue nears completion. Finally, visitors to the Kotel (Western Wall) had a new experience - the sight of Jews and Muslims praying together. It brings new hope for the New Year. The photo (TY Sharon) is of the inside of Jerusalem's new National Library of Israel, which will be opening in October.  Wishing those that celebrate it a peaceful and meaningful Yom Kippur and a very happy Sukkot / Tabernacles

[danniswrites]

My writing turned totally around in Jan 2022. I was editing my latest NaNoWriMo project, and decided to check out a resource I found on nanowrimo.org to help me. Basically, I wanted help to write a dynamite blurb, or tagline. When I create a new story, I use a LibreOffice template I created to put my title page, copyright page with a sentence describing what the story's about, TOC, and a dummy first paragraph with my first dummy paragraph heading.

I wanted to know how to write better taglines.

So I read the article above and the light bulb went on! Simple. Elegant. Plotting.

I had always been a pantser. Never planned any part of my stories, and I have about 650 of 'em, half not even to the first draft. Dedicated pantser. In my teen years, I hated English literature in 8th grade even though I knew I needed to know how to plot, but all the analysis of the books we read [and I enjoyed reading them] just made me feel like, 'I'm too stupid to learn all this.'

Now, I'm reading these 10 steps and had an epiphany!

So, I broke down Step 1 and made it into my worksheet for coming up with taglines.

Here's how I think about those 15 max words to get it done:

One Sentence Summary: Adj.+Noun+Verb+Obj [Worker] [Action] [Effect] in 15 words or less Character With Most To Lose: What They Want:

So, for Adia, Scientist, here's what I came up with:

Discouraged scientist must discover a new fuel so her colony can escape from war.

I write science fiction and I loved chemistry in college, so, hey, I like formulas. I don't want my writing to sound like it came from a formula, but if you look at a lot of genres, there is one.

If you read enough romances, like my sister did, you figure out there's a pattern you can follow as a writer. I was there when she did. She went on to become famous and actually got an award presented to her in New York from her idol, Barbara Cartland at a writer's conference.

I--uh, I'm the non-famous sister who self-publishes on Amazon. But I enjoy my writing life, and though I do love to put romance in my books, romance writing is not my thing.

However, if you're like me and you want to improve your writing, Snowflake Method does work for a lot of us. And, if you buy one of Randy Ingermanson's very entertaining books, you get a free copy of his Snowflake Pro software, which walks you through each step and lets you see what you wrote in the previous step.

I don't do all 10 steps. Let's face it, I'm a plantser now. I'm not that meticuolous and organized. But, I do most of them, because Steps 1-5 give me a nice head start. And, Steps 3, 5 and 7 concentrate on your characters. Characters make your story. If you don't have a character that grabs your reader from the first chapter, why will they want to read your story? You have to have someone to care about and they have to have something happening that attracts the reader.

Now that I had a loose framework for my stories, I needed to [finally] learn something about plot structure more than the beginning, 3 disasters, and an ending. Randy does an excellent job of simplifying 3 act structure [though there are other methods such as PlotDot or Save The Cat that also work with Snowflake Method].

Another resource I found while exploring resources in the Now What? Revision pages on nanowrimo.org was K. M. Weiland's wonderful site:

This lady puts 3 act structure into terms that I can understand, and she has a vast database of books and movies that she's analyzed for us. If you think 3 act structure is complicated and boring, try reading a little of your favorite on this list:

I love the Marvel movies, so here's how she summarized The Avengers.

And she even mentions how what works in this movie would not, in a book. This is something I read time and time again about science fiction writing. Science fiction movies are not 'true' science fiction, for the most part. Star Wars is fantasy set on other planets. Star Trek has science in it, but again, is science fantasy.

In science fiction, science drives the story more than characters or plot. Though, to make my science fiction more accessible to a wider audience, I choose to concentrate on psychology, particularly interpersonal relationships. I do make sure that my science is feasible and believable, and explain it simply. And, I do my research.

So, when writing a book, it's good to see analyses like this of movies, but remember, it's different for books.

A friend who was also a producer told me, for a two-hour movie, you have to choose about two chapters for your script. The director has to insert some points to connect the dots. That's why many movies 'aren't like the book' they're based upon. It's an art to take a book and condense it like that so it still makes sense and absorbs the viewer.

But, we writers can learn much from movies about character development and how to get our readers involved with them, and with our stories.

[ettawritesnstudies]

9 people I'd like to know better tag

Thanks for the tag @moondust-bard!

current book: I'm about to start reading White Oaks by Jordan King for my indie author interviews/book reviews on my blog, and listening to The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec because I have a road trip to a work conference tomorrow and so I'm going to put that on in the car.

Current fic: I'm not actively reading or writing anything right now, but I have an old friend in the Newsies fandom who's continuing to put out chapters of a 300K+ fic that I love called Something Worth Winning and so I've been meaning to catch up on that. PJean over on ff.net and I think she's got an AO3 now? It's been a while...

Currently watching: Twelve's run in Doctor Who and the Clone wars in rotation.

Next on my watchlist: I'm about the start the new Fallout show tonight! Eric's been playing through the games recently but we've put off watching the show until my edit was done.

Current hyperfixation: I had Rolling With Difficulty as a hyperfixation until I got buried in Runaways writing, so I lost interest for a little bit while I shifted focus onto my work, but I'm hoping to get back into it!

Favorite color: Greens of all sorts!

Sweet, spicy, or savory: sweet, I joke I'm basically a hummingbird in human form.

Relationship status: I just got engaged over Easter! I don't talk a lot about him here because he values his privacy, but my fiance, Eric, has been such a wonderful support through all of my writing and publishing endeavors. We're in the middle of wedding planning right now, and if all goes according to plan, we'll get married next summer, which is right in the middle of all the promotion and distribution work for putting out Runaways in October. It's going to be such a busy (and expensive) year, and I was like "I can push the book release out, I guess :I" but he refused to let me do that because he knows how important it is to me and encouraged me to plan a Kickstarter for the spring like an absolute madman. Yesterday I complained that the formatting programming software I like is only available for Macs but fuck apple and he started looking up how to install a virtual machine without a second's hesitation. He's so wonderful and I don't know what I'd do without him.

Last song: The Old Witch Sleep and Good Man Grace by the Amazing Devil

Last thing I googled: Stegosaurus dinosaur

Skill I’d like to learn: oh god so many. Top of the list right now is songwriting. I've got dozens of lyrics cluttering up my notes app and I'm dreadful at turning them into complete songs. Also Animation!

Best advice: Recently, I've seen a lot of people in my life struggling with the 20-something capitalist-hellscape 1st-world-problem flavor of existentialist-depression and look, it gets to me too, but you guy have got to relearn the virtue of gratitude. On one hand, toxic positivity sucks and you're allowed to bitch and moan about your situation, but doomerism feels infectious and there is so much to be thankful for when you stop and take the time to appreciate what you've been given.

I'm turning into my mom.

[jcmarchi]

Broadcom's AI surge challenges Nvidia's dominance

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/broadcoms-ai-surge-challenges-nvidias-dominance/

Broadcom's AI surge challenges Nvidia's dominance

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Riding the AI wave, semiconductor giant Broadcom has joined the stampede of companies chasing Nvidia for a piece of the lucrative AI chip market. The computing and software conglomerate is up more than 66% in the past year, as it makes power moves to establish itself as one of the most dominant players in AI today. Broadcom has been making aggressive moves that have piqued the interest of analysts and investors, from buying VMware in a $61 billion deal to strengthen its data centre and cloud chops, to investments in AI chip R&D.

Central to Broadcom’s AI aspirations now is its fast-growing AI-connected chip business, which the company said it now forecasts will bring in an astounding $11 billion in revenue for fiscal 2024, up from a previous forecast of $10 billion. Combined with a 15% jump in Broadcom Inc shares recently, the upward revision reinforces the strong appetite for chips driving the rise of generative AI.

Morningstar analysts agreed in a note to Reuters that Broadcom remains “we continue to see Broadcom as incredibly well-positioned to benefit from rising generative AI investment in the long term,” — a view widely held on Wall Street. A second explanation for the upswing in AI for Broadcom is essentially through buying or investing very well over the years.

They come as one of three planned spinoffs in Dell’s drive to become a full-fledged cloud computing firm with the $61 billion acquisition of VMware next year, which also added $50 billion to its market capitalisation, per FactSet data. In addition, Broadcom has been ramping up its own custom AI chip business, inking deals with tech giants including Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms.

In March, the company revealed that a third unidentified customer was using its custom AI chips, which gave its business credibility in this high-stakes industry. According to Reuters, “At an investor conference on Wednesday, Broadcom said it will produce the new custom AI chips for ‘hyperscaler’ buyers that are mostly Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms.”

Diversified revenue streams and investor optimism

Broadcom’s software division, bolstered by the VMware acquisition, added $2.7 billion to its second-quarter revenue, further diversifying the company’s revenue streams and positioning it as a formidable force in the AI ecosystem. The company’s stock performance reflects this optimism, with shares surging 76% over the past 12 months and closing at a staggering $1,495.5 on Wednesday. 

Broadcom’s recent announcement of a 10-for-1 stock split, a move reminiscent of Nvidia’s strategy, is expected to further fuel investor enthusiasm. “It’s a sure-fire way to send your stock soaring,” Triple D Trading analyst Dennis Dick told Reuters, commenting on the stock split, adding that the move was “right out of Nvidia’s book.”

Nvidia’s dominance and competitive pressure

Broadcom is progressing, but Nvidia is still the leader in this space. For years, Nvidia has benefited from the first-mover advantage of producing AI chips that cater to a long tail of applications while favoring innovation over turning in big volume. While that balance appears to be in flux, Broadcom’s recent wins shed light on how the writing may be on the wall for a boom in AI now benefiting more than just one company.

This new contender has even forced Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang to admit that ‘a resurgent Broadcom (and other start-ups) have planners at Nvidia nervous. Huang, for his part, stressed how the company must continue to innovate to ensure that it remains ahead of its peers. Nevertheless, competition has yet to make a dent on Nvidia’s enviable lead in the AI chip market as the company busily cranks out its top-performing AI tech.

Broadcom vs Nvidia: The battle for AI chip supremacy

Unlike Nvidia’s graphics processing units which have long dominated the industry, Broadcom’s custom AI chips – or application-specific integrated circuits – might offer a great business opportunity for tech giants with massive and steady-state AI workloads. These bespoke chips require considerable initial capital investment but they can offer large cost savings in both CapEx and power consumption, which sets them up as a more cost-effective (if less general purpose) option to Nvidia’s.

Also bullish on Broadcom is Piper Sandler analyst Harsh Kumar, who writes, “We continue to see [Broadcom] as the best AI play [excluding Nvidia] due to its strong positioning in the custom ASIC business along with its strong software portfolio.”

Broadcom’s multi-pronged strategy of pumping cash into buyouts, offering bespoke chips and expanding into a software business has established it as a strong rival, as the AI revolution shows few signs of abating. Nvidia is still the undisputed leader in the industry, but Broadcom’s bold AI play here was enough to light a fire under investors and analysts both, sowing the seeds of what could become an epic showdown in the market for AI chips.

(Photo by Kenny Eliason)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, broadcom, Nvidia

[thesaleswhisperer]

Michael Falato on The Sales Podcast

https://blog.thesaleswhisperer.com/p/michael-falato

  00:00 Introduction and Air Force Stories

11:33 Sales as a Service: Full Throttle Falato Leads

24:27 Lead Generation Strategies

29:22 Pricing and Comparisons

36:17 Aim High and Provide Value

Takeaways

Michael Falato transitioned from a career in sales and real estate to starting his own company, Full Throttle Falato Leads, which offers sales as a service using software automation.

Personalization and value are key in outreach. Michael invites prospects to be featured guests on his podcast or roundtable as a way to start a conversation.

Tools like Apollo can be effective for lead generation, but it's important to understand how to use them properly and avoid spamming or breaking email deliverability rules.

The future of cold email outreach is uncertain, as platforms like Google may implement stricter measures to prevent spam.

Building relationships and providing value are essential in sales, regardless of the industry or approach. Attending conferences and events can be a valuable way to meet potential clients and generate leads.

Social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can be used to connect with prospects and set up meetings.

Personalization and finding common ground with prospects can help make outreach more effective.

Having a strong mindset and being persistent are important qualities in sales.

Building relationships and providing value to clients are key to long-term success in lead generation.

Market like you mean it.

Now go sell something.

SUBSCRIBE to sell more, faster, at higher margins, with less stress, and more fun!

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Check out The Sales Podcast's latest episode

[nanowrimo]

Back to School: Interview with Virginia Pratt, Young Writers Program Educator

NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program helps over 85,000 kids, teens, teachers, and families set creative goals and tell stories they care about. We asked some of our amazing YWP educators to share how they take on the NaNoWriMo challenge in their classroom. Today’s advice comes from Virginia Pratt, who has been an educator for over 35 years.

Q: What grade/ age level do you work with? What type of NaNoWriMo group is it (whole class, club, homeschool, elective, etc.)?

A: I teach 4th/5th Grade gifted/talented ELA.

Q: How long have you been doing NaNoWriMo with your students?

A: 4 years (this will be year 5)

Q: How do you structure the entire project (for example, do you start prepping in October and write in November, do you have kids work on it all year, etc.)?

A: I use the month of October to prep. We do a reading/writing workshop, and I find that the materials are great for helping me work with the students on understanding literary elements as we read in October and prepare for the writing in November. As students are working on crafting their own characters, we are studying the arc of character in reading—seeing how different events impact them, how they change over time, what conflicts they face, etc. We do this with setting, with plot arc, etc.

Q: What does a normal NaNoWriMo day look like for your students?

A: In November, once we are writing the stories, kids have their independent writing time to work on their stories. I read their work and confer with them, and they also have writing partners with whom they meet during the week. As they encounter struggle—dialogue, for example—we have mini-lessons on those things and then students continue to move forward. While they only have 20 - 30 minutes of writing time during the day, many kids opt to write at night and in other "choice times".

Q: How do you set and manage word-count goals?

A: I give the kids an example of what different word counts look like, once typed. I tell them the length of some texts they are all familiar with. I tell them my work count, and explain that I write/type much more quickly than they do. When they make their goal, I let that stand unless they come to me later and say they want to change their goal. Changing a goal (either increasing or decreasing) is not ever an issue.

Q: How do you manage grading? Do you grade?

A: Grades come from what I see them doing as a result of our entire process. I take grades on their reading comprehension and understanding of literary elements, figurative language, etc. All of those things are positively impacted by their work actually manipulating them in their own writing. I do give a grade based on effort and growth, and the students have a rubric/checklist of things I am looking for in their writing. They all get good grades because they are working with me in conferences and they are motivated to participate.

Q: How do you approach revision/ publishing (if at all)?

A: We do some revision work—as kids bring up areas that are causing them difficulty - during November, but we save most of that work for the month of January and the "Now What?" phase.

Q: Any NaNoWriMo tips or tricks to share with other educators? Hard-won lessons? Ah-ha moments?

A: I think it is really important to be accepting of what the kids want to try to do. The way the program materials are set up, if a child tries to write a piece with little to no substance, it's easy for me to go back to the workbook and say, "Okay, but why is your character doing this?" "What made him/her act this way?" "What conflict is impacting your character? " They realize pretty quickly that they are missing a lot of key information that they NEED to make a good story.

If a kid wants to do a comic book or graphic novel, I find a way to let them do that. We use storyboards or software that helps them put that together, and then handle the word count manually.

My focus is on getting them excited to write, and having them actually do writing. We can polish and improve the work later, but just getting them to tell a story and take the risk to put it out there is the most important part.

Q: Have you ever run into resistance from your administration about doing NaNoWriMo, and if so, how did you manage it? What do you say to people who don’t see the point of having students write novels? 

A: I haven't had any issues. Generally if anyone does question what we are doing, they stop questioning when they see how engaged the kids are.

Q: What are the most meaningful things you or your students take away from the project? What's your best NaNoWriMo memory?

A: The best part for us is that there is a true sense of being part of a greater community of writers who are all struggling/working together to get closer to a dream of being a published writer. We watch some of the videos NaNoWriMo posts that are appropriate for 10-11 year-olds, and we've also used some video tape of some of the write-ins where a topic is given for everyone to write on for 10 minutes. If I select those carefully, they really open the kids up to a different way of thinking about their writing. The best memories are around those kids who are so proud of how much they've written, or if they've met their goal.

Q: Anything else you'd like to add?

A: For me, the whole thing is about feeling and acting like a writer. The kids don't know it's possible until we let them try. Some surprise themselves AND me with what they can do. Even those who don't start off thinking of themselves as writers come out understanding more about the process and seeing where some of their strengths lie. It gives them something to build on as they move on through school and are asked to write. It's important that NaNoWriMo represents a measure of success for every kid. That works wonders in helping them to take further steps as writers.

Virginia Pratt has been an educator for 35 years, and currently works with 4th and 5th grade students. An avid reader and notebooker, Dr. Pratt loves bringing an appreciation of story to her students and strives to help them to feel like successful readers and writers every day. Dr. Pratt loves music, roller coasters, and naps and enjoys spending time with her family and friends and traveling.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Unity's feudal gambit as class struggle between rentiers and capitalists

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. And on Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The outcome of this struggle is what determines whether the digital society is capitalist or feudalistic. Think of the recent grab by games toolsmith Unity, who have long extracted rents from the capitalists who used their tools to make games. Unity is “software as a service,” which means that you have to buy again it every month, for so long as your capitalist enterprise is in business.

The capitalists who rent Unity’s tools had resigned themselves to this, but then Unity went one step further, and demanded a royalty (a word with decidedly feudal origins!) every time a game made with Unity’s tools was distributed. The outcry was ferocious, and Unity eventually backed down, but even as they did, company executives insisted that they would continue to pursue a “sustainable system” for “shared success.”

��Shared success” is a pure expression of feudalism. Unity was not proposing a joint venture, where they would supply the capital to produce games and share the risk of that capital being competed away by a better games-maker.

Instead, Unity wants a rentier’s bargain: if the capitalist it rents do does well, so does Unity. But if the capitalist does badly — if a games-maker loses out to a competitor who is also a tenant of Unity’s IP — then unity also does well. Heads capitalists lose, tails the rentier wins.

When Unity speaks of this system being “sustainable,” they mean that they will seek to maximize the total amount of profits made by capitalists who rent its tools. Because the higher the total profits are, the more rent it can extract.

Profits are highest where competition is lowest. It’s in Unity’s interest for a single company — or a cartel of companies — to control entire genres or modes of games, and to be protected from innovators who might enter the market with better offers. Unity wants to pick some winners and bind them to its fields.

-A Major Defeat For Technofeudalism: We euthanized some rentiers.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[cyberstudious]

A Beginner's Guide to Learning Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

(Side note: this post is aimed towards the technical side of security, rather than the governance/management side, because the tech stuff is what I'm familiar with.)

Where do I start?

Cybersecurity is a specialization of general tech & therefore builds on some concepts that you'll need to know before you can dive deep into security. It's good to have a background in and understand:

how computers & operating systems work

how to use Linux

computer networking & basic protocols

If you're serious about learning cybersecurity, it can be helpful to look at certifications. Even if you don't want to get certified or take the exam (they can get expensive), they provide you with a list of topics that you can use to guide your self-study. And if you want to find a job, a certification is practically required for getting your foot in the door.

I personally recommend the CompTIA series of certifications, because they're well-recognized and I think they expose you to a good breadth and depth of material to get you started. Start with the A+ certification if you have zero tech background. Start with the Network+ certification if you've never taken a networking course. Once you get your basic computer and networking knowledge down, then you can jump into security. The Security+ is a good starting point.

Do I need to know how to code?

No, but it would be really really helpful. You don't have to be a skilled software engineer, but understanding the basics and being able to write small scripts will give you a solid foundation.

From Daniel Miessler's post How to Build a Cybersecurity Career:

You can get a job without being a programmer. You can even get a good job. And you can even get promoted to management. But you won’t ever hit the elite levels of infosec if you cannot build things. Websites. Tools. Proofs of concept. Etc. If you can’t code, you’ll always be dependent on those who can.

How do I gain skills?

Play Capture the Flag (CTF) games.

Stay up to date with security news via an RSS reader, podcasts, or whatever works for you. Research terms that you're unfamiliar with.

Watch conference talks that get uploaded to YouTube.

Spin up a VM to practice working with tools and experiment on your own computer.

There are lots of brilliant, generous people in cybersecurity who share their knowledge and advice for free. Find their blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Look for local meetups in your area.

I'm still relatively new to the field, but I have a general knowledge of lots of different things, so feel free to send me an ask and I can probably help point you to some resources. We're all in this together!

Previous Cybersecurity Masterposts

An Introduction to Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Book Masterpost

Free Cybersecurity Learning Resources Masterpost

Masterpost of Study Tips for Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity Tools Masterpost

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the #StudyblrMasterpostJam this week! It was wonderful to see what other studyblr folks are passionate about. The jam technically ends today but there are no official rules, so if you've been thinking about writing a masterpost, this is your sign!

[annajade456]

Navigating the DevOps Landscape: Your Comprehensive Guide to Mastery

In today's ever-evolving IT landscape, DevOps has emerged as a mission-critical practice, reshaping how development and operations teams collaborate, accelerating software delivery, enhancing collaboration, and bolstering efficiency. If you're enthusiastic about embarking on a journey towards mastering DevOps, you've come to the right place. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore some of the most exceptional resources for immersing yourself in the world of DevOps.

Online Courses: Laying a Strong Foundation

One of the most effective and structured methods for establishing a robust understanding of DevOps is by enrolling in online courses. ACTE Institute, for instance, offers a wide array of comprehensive DevOps courses designed to empower you to learn at your own pace. These meticulously crafted courses delve deep into the fundamental principles, best practices, and practical tools that are indispensable for achieving success in the world of DevOps.

Books and Documentation: Delving into the Depth

Books serve as invaluable companions on your DevOps journey, providing in-depth insights into the practices and principles of DevOps. "The Phoenix Project" by the trio of Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is highly recommended for gaining profound insights into the transformative potential of DevOps. Additionally, exploring the official documentation provided by DevOps tool providers offers an indispensable resource for gaining nuanced knowledge.

DevOps Communities: Becoming Part of the Conversation

DevOps thrives on the principles of community collaboration, and the digital realm is replete with platforms that foster discussions, seek advice, and facilitate the sharing of knowledge. Websites such as Stack Overflow, DevOps.com, and Reddit's DevOps subreddit serve as vibrant hubs where you can connect with fellow DevOps enthusiasts and experts, engage in enlightening conversations, and glean insights from those who've traversed similar paths.

Webinars and Events: Expanding Your Horizons

To truly expand your DevOps knowledge and engage with industry experts, consider attending webinars and conferences dedicated to this field. Events like DevOpsDays and DockerCon bring together luminaries who generously share their insights and experiences, providing you with unparalleled opportunities to broaden your horizons. Moreover, these events offer the chance to connect and network with peers who share your passion for DevOps.

Hands-On Projects: Applying Your Skills

In the realm of DevOps, practical experience is the crucible in which mastery is forged. Therefore, seize opportunities to take on hands-on projects that allow you to apply the principles and techniques you've learned. Contributing to open-source DevOps initiatives on platforms like GitHub is a fantastic way to accrue real-world experience, all while contributing to the broader DevOps community. Not only do these projects provide tangible evidence of your skills, but they also enable you to build an impressive portfolio.

DevOps Tools: Navigating the Landscape

DevOps relies heavily on an expansive array of tools and technologies, each serving a unique purpose in the DevOps pipeline. To become proficient in DevOps, it's imperative to establish your own lab environments and engage in experimentation. This hands-on approach allows you to become intimately familiar with tools such as Jenkins for continuous integration, Docker for containerization, Kubernetes for orchestration, and Ansible for automation, to name just a few. A strong command over these tools equips you to navigate the intricate DevOps landscape with confidence.

Mentorship: Guiding Lights on Your Journey

To accelerate your journey towards DevOps mastery, consider seeking mentorship from seasoned DevOps professionals. Mentors can provide invaluable guidance, share real-world experiences, and offer insights that are often absent from textbooks or online courses. They can help you navigate the complexities of DevOps, provide clarity during challenging moments, and serve as a source of inspiration. Mentorship is a powerful catalyst for growth in the DevOps field.

By harnessing the full spectrum of these resources, you can embark on a transformative journey towards becoming a highly skilled DevOps practitioner. Armed with a profound understanding of DevOps principles, practical experience, and mastery over essential tools, you'll be well-equipped to tackle the multifaceted challenges and opportunities that the dynamic field of DevOps presents. Remember that continuous learning and staying abreast of the latest DevOps trends are pivotal to your ongoing success. As you embark on your DevOps learning odyssey, know that ACTE Technologies is your steadfast partner, ready to empower you on this exciting journey. Whether you're starting from scratch or enhancing your existing skills, ACTE Technologies Institute provides you with the resources and knowledge you need to excel in the dynamic world of DevOps. Enroll today and unlock your boundless potential. Your DevOps success story begins here. Good luck on your DevOps learning journey!

[good-old-gossip]

Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah: ‘Tomorrow is a Palestinian day’

On April 12, the German government prevented Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah from entering the country to address a conference in Berlin as a witness to the genocide in Gaza. The day before, on April 11, Abu-Sittah was installed as Glasgow University Rector in Bute Hall following his landslide election with 80% of the vote. Below is a transcript of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s address. 

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

The students of Glasgow University decided to vote in memory of 52,000 Palestinians killed. In memory of 14,000 children murdered. They voted in solidarity with 17,000 Palestinian children orphaned, 70,000 wounded — of whom 50% are children — and the 4-5,000 children whose limbs have been amputated.

They voted to stand in solidarity with the students and the teachers of 360 schools destroyed and 12 universities completely leveled. They stood in solidarity with the family and the memory of Dima Alhaj, a Glasgow University alumni murdered with her baby and with her whole family. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Lenin predicted that real revolutionary change in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movements against imperialism and in the slave colonies. Glasgow University students understood what we have to lose when we allow our politics to become inhuman. They also understand that what is important and different about Gaza is that it is the laboratory in which global capital is looking at the management of surplus populations. 

They stood next to Gaza and in solidarity with its people because they understood that the weapons that Benjamin Netanyahu uses today are the weapons that Narendra Modi will use tomorrow. The quadcopters and drones fitted with sniper guns – used so deviously and efficiently in Gaza that one night at Al-Ahli hospital we received over 30 wounded civilians shot outside our hospital by these inventions – used today in Gaza will be used tomorrow in Mumbai, in Nairobi and in Sao Paulo. Eventually, like the facial recognition software developed by the Israelis, they will come to Easterhouse and Springburn. 

So, in reality, who did these students vote for? My name is Ghassan Solieman Hussain Dahashan Saqer Dahashan Ahmed Mahmoud Abu-Sittah and, with the exception of myself, my father and all of my forefathers were born in Palestine, a land that was given away by one of Glasgow University’s previous rectors. Three decades before his forty-six-word declaration announced the British government’s support for the settler colonization of Palestine, Arthur Balfour was appointed Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. “A survey of the world… shows us a vast number of savage communities, apparently at a stage of culture not profoundly different from that which prevailed among pre-historic man,” said Balfour during his rectorial address in 1891. Sixteen years later, this antisemite masterminded the Aliens Act of 1905 to prevent Jews escaping from the pogroms of Eastern Europe from coming to safety in the United Kingdom. 

In 1920, my grandfather Sheikh Hussain built a school with his own money in the small village where my family lived. There he set the foundations for a relationship that made education central to my family’s life. On May 15, 1948, Haganah forces ethnically cleansed that village and drove my family, who had lived on that land for generations, into a refugee camp in Khan Younis that now stands in ruins in the Gaza Strip. The memoirs of the Haganah officer who had invaded my grandfather’s house were found by my uncle. In these memoirs, the officer notes with incredulity how the house was full of books and had a certificate for a law degree from the University of Cairo, belonging to my grandfather. 

The year after the Nakba, my father graduated from medical school at Cairo University and moved back to Gaza to work in UNRWA in its newly formed clinics. But like many of his generation, he moved to the Gulf to help build the health system in those countries. In 1963, he came to Glasgow to pursue his postgraduate training in pediatrics and fell in love with the city and its people. 

And so it was that in 1988, I came to study medicine at Glasgow University, and here I discovered what medicine can do, how a career in medicine places you at the cold face of people’s lives, and how if you are equipped with the right political, sociological and economic lenses, you can understand how people’s lives are being shaped, and many times contorted, by political forces beyond their control. 

And it was in Glasgow that I saw for the first time the meaning of international solidarity. Glasgow in that time was rife with groups that were organizing solidarity with El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Palestine. Glasgow City Council was one of the first to twin with cities in the West Bank and Glasgow University set up its first scholarship for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It really was during my years in Glasgow that my journey as a war surgeon started, first as a student when I went to the first American war in Iraq in 1991; then with Mike Holmes to South Lebanon in 1993; then with my wife to Gaza during the Second Intifada; then to the wars waged by the Israelis on Gaza in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021; to the war in Mosul in Northern Iraq, to Damascus during the Syrian war and to the Yemen war. But it wasn’t until the 9th of October that I got to Gaza and saw the genocide unfold. 

Everything that I had known about wars compared to nothing that I had seen. It was the difference between a flood and a tsunami. For 43 days, I watched the killing machines tear apart the lives and the bodies of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of whom were children. After I came out, the students of Glasgow University reached out for me to run for election as rector. Soon after, one of Balfour’s savages won the election. 

So what have we learned from the genocide and about genocide over the last 6 months? We’ve learned that scholasticide, the elimination of whole educational institutions, both infrastructure and human resources, is a critical component of the genocidal erasure of a people. 12 universities completely flattened. 400 schools. 6,000 students killed. 230 school teachers killed. 100 professors and deans and two university presidents killed. 

We also learnt, and this is something I found out when I left Gaza, that the genocidal project is like an iceberg of which Israel is only the tip. The rest of the iceberg is made up of an axis of genocide. This axis of genocide is the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Canada, and France… countries that have supported Israel with arms – and continue to support the genocide with arms – and have maintained political support for the genocidal project so that it would continue. We should not be fooled by the United States’ attempts at humanitarianizing the genocide: Killing people while dropping food aid by parachute. 

I also discovered that part of the genocidal iceberg are genocide enablers. Little people, men and women, in every facet of life, in every institution. These genocidal enablers come in three types. 

The first are those whose racialization and total othering of Palestinians has rendered them unable to feel anything for the 14,000 children who have been killed and for whom Palestinian children remain ungrievable. Had Israel killed 14,000 puppies or kittens they would have been completely destroyed by the barbarity of it. 

The second group are those whom Hannah Arendt said in ‘The Banality of Evil’, “had no motives at all, except for extraordinary diligence in looking after his personal advancement.”

The third are the apathetic. As Arendt said, “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.”

In April 1915, one year after the First World War began, Rosa Luxemburg wrote about German bourgeois society. “Violated, dishonored, wading in blood… the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity.” Those of us who have seen, smelt, and heard what the weapons of war do to a child’s body by design, those of us who have amputated the unsalvageable limbs of wounded children can never have anything but the utmost disdain for all involved in the manufacture, design, and sale of these instruments of brutalism. The aim of weapons manufacturing is to destroy life and to ravage nature. In the arms industry, profits rise not only as a result of the resources captured in or through war, but through the process of destruction of all life, both human and environmental. The idea that there would be peace or an unpolluted world while capital grows by war is ludicrous. Neither the arms trade nor the fossil fuel trade, have any place at University. 

So, what is our plan, this ��savage” and his accomplices? 

We will campaign for divestment from arms manufacturing and the fossil fuel industry in this University, both to de-risk the University following the International Court of Justice’s ruling that this is plausibly a genocidal war and the current case brought against Germany by Nicaragua for complicity in genocide. 

Genocidal blood money made as a profit from these shares during the war will be used to set up a fund to help rebuild Palestinian academic institutions. This fund will be in the name of Dima Alhaj and in memory of a life cut short by this genocide. 

We will form a coalition of student and civil society groups and unions to turn Glasgow University into a campus free from gender-based violence. 

We will campaign to find concrete solutions to end student poverty at Glasgow University and to provide affordable housing to all students. 

We will campaign for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions that have progressed from being complicit in apartheid and the denial of education to Palestinians to genocide and the denial of life. We will campaign for a new definition of antisemitism that does not conflate anti-zionism and anti-Israeli genocidal settler colonialism with antisemitism. 

We will fight with all othered and racialized communities, including the Jewish community, the Roma community, Muslims, black people, and all racialized groups, against the common enemy of a rising right-wing fascism, now absolved of its antisemitic roots by an Israeli government in exchange for their support for the elimination of the Palestinian people. 

Only this week, just this week, we saw how a German government-funded institution censured a Jewish intellectual and philosopher, Nancy Fraser, because of her support of the Palestinian people. Over a year ago, we watched the Labour Party suspend Moshé Machover, a Jewish anti-zionist campaigner, for antisemitism. 

On the flight up, I was fortunate enough to be reading ‘We Are Free to Change the World’ by  Lyndsey Stonebridge. I quote from this book: “It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously and complicatedly matters the most.” 90 years ago, in his “Solidarity Song,” Bertolt Brecht asked, “Whose tomorrow is tomorrow? And whose world is the world?”

Well, my answer to him, to you, and to the students of Glasgow University: It is your world to fight for. It is your tomorrow to make. For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day. 

In 1984, when Glasgow University made Winnie Mandela its Rector in the darkest days of P. W. Botha’s rule under a brutal apartheid regime, supported by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, no one could have dreamt that in 40 years South African men and women could be standing in front of the International Court of Justice defending the Palestinian people’s right to life as free citizens of a free nation. 

One of this genocide’s aims is to drown us in our own sorrow. On a personal note, I want to hold space so that I and my family can grieve for our loved ones. I dedicate this to the memory of our beloved Abdelminim killed at 74 on the day of his birth. I dedicate it to the memory of my colleague Dr. Midhat Saidam who had stepped out for half an hour to take his sister to their house so that she could be safe with her children and never came back. I dedicate it to my friend and my colleague Dr. Ahmad Makadmeh who was executed by the Israeli army in Shifa Hospital just over 10 days ago with his wife. I dedicate it to the ever-smiling Dr. Haitham Abu-Hani, head of the Emergency Department at Shifa Hospital, who always met me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder. But most of all we dedicate this to our land. In the words of the ever-present Mahmoud Darwish,

“To our land, and it is a prize of war, the freedom to die from longing and burning and our land, in its bloodied night, is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far and illuminates what’s outside it … As for us, inside, we suffocate more!”

And so I want to end with hope. In the words of the immortal Bobby Sands, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” 

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE!

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