#from the job postings for both library techs and librarians | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years ago

Text

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

116 notes · View notes

rayveewrites · 4 years ago

Text

Ray Hijacks the Team ZIT Ghostbuster AU Again

So @shadeswift99 made a few posts a while ago about a Team ZIT(S) ghostbuster AU, And then I may or may not have hijacked the post to add in ideas for most of the other hermits because why not.

Now, back then I was spitballing ideas and making them up on the spot, which is admittedly my usual writing process, but hey.

That said, I've had more time to think about it, and then last night I blacked out for a few hours and came to with a Google Doc filled with short bios for all of the hermits and a handful of hermit-adjacents. Now, this rapidly turned into an urban fantasy AU in my hands, but hey. It's fun.

This is in alphabetical order, with alternate personas (EX, Helsknight, Beetlejhost) beneath their original counterparts when applicable:

Bdubs

Lives in an old mansion in the woods alongside Doc for reasons known only to them. Bdubs works as an interior designer, with a side gig as a freelance hairdresser. His eyes are unnaturally large, similar to Keralis’, and he is at least partially a plant. Completely feral and frequently gets in trouble for having knives on him at all times. He and Cleo have a thing called Knife Club which makes everyone else nervous. Nobody messes with Knife Club. It’s not worth it. Sunbathes frequently.

Beef

Is a perfectly normal human being. He works as a butcher with a side gig as a graphic designer specializing in album covers and spends his free time playing pokemon and dragging Etho along to social events. He was the first person to spot the cryptid, and the first person who Etho approached of his own accord.

Biffa

Is a ghost possessing a robotic shell. Biffa is from the future. While initially his main goal was to get back home to his own time, Biffa has since made friends and settled down into a new life running a cafe specializing in a wide range of teas. He’s quite content with this, and has actually found himself far happier than he was in his own time. While his nature means he can see, hear and touch ghosts, his body was built specifically for a disembodied soul to be in the driver’s seat, and he doesn’t want to risk another taking control. Also, he has more important things to do than have fistfights with ghosts.

Cleo

Is a ghost possessing her own dead corpse. Her nature allows her to see, hear and touch ghosts. Can and will fistfight spirits. She works as a teacher, so she’s usually busy, but occasionally in really nasty situations the Beetlejhost will drag her in to break a ghost’s legs. Does sculpture in her free time, and is actually really good. The only one who can wrangle Beetle to any real capacity, and she’s learned to keep him on a fairly short leash. Housemates with Joe, and Keralis also pops in pretty frequently. Has Knife Club with Bdubs. Has an enchanted flower crown that prevents her from decaying further; a gift from Beetle. Recently started learning magic in the form of necromancy and illusions. Has an ongoing ‘feud’ with Zloy, in which she temporarily traps his soul in random inanimate objects every now and then.

Cub

A bit of a ‘mad scientist’ archetype, Cub’s experiments are not exactly the most ethical, though they’re at least more professional than Doc’s. Responsible for the creation of Jevin. Cub gets possessed stupidly easily- sometimes willingly- and can usually handle it himself but sometimes has to call for help. Has a magical method of communication with Scar for exactly this reason. Has a day job as co-owner of a business called ConCorp, which he started with Scar. Has probably broken the Geneva Convention.

Doc

Was presumably human at one point. Now an abomination. Repeated experiments on himself have resulted in a massively changed facial and foot structure, a body covered in mottled green scales, claws, and goat horns. He lost half his face in one of his experiments, and constructed a new cybernetic one. He lost his right arm fighting God. Killed said god and would do it again. Lives in a mansion in the woods with Bdubs, though nobody’s really sure why. Owns a casino because of course he does. Also a living crime against fashion, because the man refuses to wear anything other than his tattered lab coat, torn jeans, and crocs.

Ely

Runs the local radio station. Nobody’s ever seen him in person, and nobody knows where he gets people’s voice clips for his remixes. Probably a cryptid. Maybe a ghost. Seems pretty chill, despite the blatant invasions of privacy.

Etho

Is a cryptid. Lives out in the woods in an abomination that can barely be called a house. Has never been seen in anything other than full Kakashi cosplay. Tends to keep to himself, but occasionally lets Beef drag him along to social events, often with Doc and Bdubs. Nobody really knows what his deal is. Probably not human. Probably.

False

Used to be part of an illegal underground cage fighting ring, until she earned enough to buy her way out. Having grown up in said ring, she struggles to adjust to normal life, but living in a town where the barista is a robot and the local tailor has wings makes it easier. She now has a job as security at Doc’s casino, alongside Iskall.

Grian

Is either an angel or a demigod, but nobody knows which. Has wings. Is both a tailor and an architect. A complete gremlin who has elaborate masks of various birds and will wear them to commit crimes. Eats seeds. Messes with everyone else’s plants. Lives in Jungle Wood Flats. Volunteers at the local theatre.

Hypno

Has three eyes, but hides the third one under a bandanna at all times. Can see ghosts with it. Had problems with sections of plumbing randomly getting clogged and also making very weird noises, and eventually called Team ZIT when the plumbers couldn’t find the source. Was prepared for ghosts, but wound up with a slime creature instead. Works in a $2 store for some reason.

Impulse

Is fully human. The most sensible member of Team ZIT (which admittedly isn’t saying much), Impulse has a day job as a freelancer building custom PCs and fixing broken tech. Agreed to the whole ghostbusting deal because he was bored, mostly. Was the first one to meet Skizz face-to-face, and is the one to own that particular place outright. Gets possessed every now and then, usually by larger spirits. Used to run solely on caffeine and chronic anxiety until Zedaph started getting on his case about his sleep schedule. Now he runs on less caffeine, more sleep, and the same amount of chronic anxiety.

Iskall

Was part of a cloning experiment to create the ultimate hitman, and was the only known one to both survive and escape before the whole thing was shut down by the authorities. Their eye and arm were replaced with cybernetics in order to increase their already enhanced abilities, and they were chased by said authorities, eventually winding up on Mumbo’s doorstep and becoming Mumbo’s problem. Now works as security at Doc’s casino, alongside False. Lives at Jungle Wood flats. Occasionally volunteers at the local theatre. Does bonsai as a hobby.

Jevin

Is the slime creature in the pipes. Hypno lets him live with him under the condition he stops blocking the plumbing and making weird noises at 3 AM (Jevin still blocks the plumbing and makes weird noises at 3 AM, just not as much as he was). Has taught himself to take a humanoid shape, and likes having fingers. Sleeps in the bathtub because he can. Was created from a vat of chemicals in a secret lab underneath the house, which used to be owned by Cub. Doesn’t really talk to the man in question that much, but will occasionally refer to Cub as his father for the sole reason of watching him go through eight existential crises in three minutes. Has a glock.

Joe

Head librarian at the local public library, and has read a lot of books on Supernatural Things. Is a veritable fountain of exposition if you can figure out what he’s saying or have Cleo along with you to threaten the integrity of his shins. Has never been seen in the same place as the Beetlejhost. Are they the same person? Are they entirely separate beings? Is there a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-type situation going on? Who knows!

Beetlejhost

Literally nobody really knows what his deal is. Nobody. Team ZIT ran into him on a call that they expected to be a false alarm and then he decided to follow them home. Spends most of his time being a minor nuisance in the most bizarre ways possible. Is implied to be responsible for the Ever Given getting lodged in the Suez Canal, but never confirmed. When he’s not bothering Team ZIT or getting them out of tight spots, he’s usually pestering Cleo, the only one who can keep him in line. It’s not really known if he and Cleo have a history or if they’re just Like That.

Keralis

Is a ghost haunting an architecture firm, and is mostly bound to the building, though he can travel to other buildings the firm has built, which is, uh, most of them. Initially only able to do small things- mostly writing notes or drawing diagrams- he eventually meets the Beetlejhost when the latter follows Mumbo to work one day for shits and giggles (he wanted to see how long he could mess with Mumbo before the man noticed. As it turned out, about a week, and by the end it was Iskall who noticed). After a couple of days in which Beetle teaches Keralis Ghost Things™, he scares half the office when he finally manifests for the first time. Has unnaturally large eyes and nicknames for most of the workers. Has no idea how he died or what his unfinished business might be. Very knowledgeable about architecture, and his input is usually very much appreciated.

Mumbo

Is a perfectly normal human being who does IT at Keralis’ architecture firm. Lives at Jungle Wood flats and spends most of his free time tinkering with tech and trying to keep Grian and Iskall out of trouble, which is a losing battle. Has a large, beating golden heart in his flat. He’s not really sure what its deal is, but if he feeds it apples it produces enough power for the entire building. Oh, and if he forgets to feed it for an extended period of time it starts draining his bank account. It’s really weird.

Pixlriffs

Was a perfectly normal human being until he died protecting a certain Russian zombie and became a perfectly normal ghost. Was a reporter in life and is a reporter in death. Runs a blog alongside Zloy about the local goings-on, supernatural or not. The blog’s the type where unless you live in/near the town you most likely won’t stumble across it, but they do have a small following of outsiders who assume the blog’s just a work of fiction. His unfinished business is to prevent Zloy from doing anything particularly stupid, a constant battle. Is able to go more places than Zloy due to being incorporeal, but respects people’s privacy. He’s bound to Zloy to a certain degree, not being able to go beyond a certain range of his friend. The range is pretty big, though, and he has plenty freedom of movement.

Python

Had a run-in with the fae as a kid, in which he accidentally pissed one off. In retribution, the faerie challenged him to answer a riddle or he’d be turned into a snake. Python’s answer was partially correct, so the faerie only transformed him partially. Python is fairly chill, though he strongly dislikes the cold and starts hissing if anyone disturbs him during Sun Time™. Sometimes Bdubs, being partially flora, joins Python for Sun Time™. He’s not venomous, because, you know...python. Also, he has a mildly disturbing habit of strangling rats and mice and then eating them whole, but he can’t help it and just tries not to do so when he has company.

Ren

Is a werewolf. He’s pretty chill regardless of form, though it’s only been recently he’s been comfortable enough leaving his ears and tail visible. He works as a lumberjack. One time Pixl introduced him to Monty Python’s Lumberjack Song and it quickly became his favourite thing. He spends most of his free time volunteering at the local theatre because Ren is absolutely a theatre kid and nobody can convince me otherwise. Gets possessed every now and then. Lives in Jungle Wood flats.

Scar

Works as a landscape developer. Gets possessed absurdly easily, though not quite as frequently as Cub. Has a magical method of communication with him. Technically co-owns ConCorp, but isn’t as involved. His cat, Jellie, is very obviously an eldritch abomination in feline form and he is comedically unaware of this. Lives in Jungle Wood Flats with Grian, Iskall, Mumbo, Stress, and Ren.

Skizz

Is the ghost haunting Team ZIT’s office. He was murdered by someone he’d thought was a friend who was trying to use his place to hide from the cops, and he’s stuck around, haunting the building. His unfinished business is to make sure nobody else uses the building for anyone shady, but the ghost rumours tended to chase most people off. Eventually he gets used to having Team ZIT around, and when Tango admits he doesn’t really have anywhere to go one day, Skizz eventually makes the decision to finally unlock the still-furnished upper floor for him. He’s bound to the building, but Impulse learns that carrying Skizz’s old vest with them allows him to leave. After that, Skizz sometimes accompanies them on missions and occasionally just hanging out. He’s usually more helpful than the Beetlejhost is.

Stress

Is a witch. Stress lives in Jungle Wood Flats and works as a doctor who specializes in supernaturally caused injuries- Team ZIT are some of her best customers. She also sells magic potions of various kinds, and has a side gig as a florist. She’s 90% of the Jungle inhabitants’ impulse control. Also has cryokinesis.

Tango

The Team ZIT member with a car. He gets possessed with frankly ridiculous frequency, but claims not to believe in ghosts for a long time (and keeps up the bit for even longer). Has developed various signals to indicate when he’s being possessed again. The strongest one, a rather nasty demon Cleo and the Beetlejhost had to team up on, left him with his glowing red eyes. He didn’t really have anywhere to go before Impulse bought the office, and tended to sleep on the couch or in his car until Skizz decided to let him into the upper floor, where he now lives alongside Zedaph and Impulse.

TFC

A now-retired ghostbuster, TFC calls in Team ZIT one night when he finds himself in over his head against a ghost with a grudge. He winds up becoming a bit of a mentor figure to the trio, usually coaching them over the phone if they’re not sure how to deal with one of the stranger spirits. Lost his leg years ago in a fight with a poltergeist that could have gone better, and now has a robotic prosthetic made by Doc.

Wels

While Team ZIT was out investigating some rumour or another in the woods, they came across a large stone box. Following video game logic, I guess, they then decided opening this large stone box sounded like a fun idea. Well, Tango and Zedaph did. Impulse was a bit more hesitant. The box actually held a medieval knight who’d been put in an enchanted sleep for centuries by his demonic doppelgänger, and was very much not prepared for modern life. Team ZIT took him to Xisuma, who happened to live closest, and Wels is currently helping out on the farm and trying to adjust to life in the 21st century. He can understand and speak modern English just fine because magic. Volunteers at the local theatre quite a lot.

Hels

Is Wels’ doppelgänger. Technically a minor demon. Won a fight with Wels and sealed him away for centuries as a result. A recurring problem. His real motivation is that he really desperately doesn’t want to go back to Hell, but he’s too proud to admit it. Lives in the woods with EX, who’s basically his only friend, though the weirdo with the brown cardigan keeps pestering him about his backstory and feelings for some reason. Has minor pyrokinesis.

Like Biffa, XB is also a ghost from the future, though it seems to be a different timeline than Biffa’s. His unfinished business is preventing the apocalypse, but he has no idea how to do that, no idea if he’s in the right timeline, and is pretty sure he’s gone back a lot farther than he probably should’ve. Also, there’s the whole paradox issue, where if he prevents the apocalypse he never has a reason to go back and prevent the apocalypse, so he doesn’t prevent the apocalypse, so he has to go back and- he tries not to think about it too much. He mostly just hangs out in an abandoned house on the edge of town and vibes.

Xisuma

Is a beekeeper. Nobody’s ever seen his face; when he’s not in his beekeeping outfit, he’s either wearing a helmet, or (more recently) an extremely lifelike and detailed animal mask (is it a mask?). Actually a shapeshifting alien, he crashed down to Earth after a scuffle with his evil clone and was stranded because Earth doesn’t have the right tools or resources to repair a spaceship. These days he’s actually found he’s happier tending to his bees, selling honey, and helping his friends out, and probably wouldn’t leave Earth even if he could. It’s a simpler life, but a pleasant one. He bonds with Biffa over a shared love of tea and being stranded in a technologically inferior world and finding a home.

Evil Xisuma

Is Xisuma’s clone. Feels that if everyone’s going to call him ‘Evil’ he may as well own it. Shot his original’s spaceship down in a scuffle but wound up being brought down with him. Currently hides in the woods. Generally more of a minor nuisance than an actual danger. Used to spend his free time bothering X but has gotten put off by Wels, who has a problem when it comes to evil clones. His friends consist of Hels, who is a terrible role model, and Zedaph, who’s trying to help him work through his problems behind everyone’s backs. Can summon lightning because he deserves it.

Zedaph

Is the reason Team ZIT is ghostbusting in the first place. He’s a sheep shearer by trade, but that’s a fairly seasonal thing and ghostbusting is more fun anyway. Has somehow never been possessed, and claims it’s because he’s always standing next to Tango. He makes sure the other two gets enough sleep Because we all know they can’t be trusted to do it. Probably has some sort of really bizarre and situational magical powers he is thoroughly unaware of. Qualified to be a licensed therapist. Made friends with Evil X at one point, somehow.

Zloy

Like Cleo, he’s a ghost possessing a corpse. Unlike Cleo, there’s a good chance it’s not his corpse. Eh, it’s not like anyone else was using it. Runs a blog with Pixl, because why not. Was already a zombie when he met Pixl, who was still alive at the time. His body is a bit more decayed than Cleo’s, but it’s fine. His goggles are enchanted with the same preservation spell; it’s not really ever explained where he got them from. Has no regard for privacy but is fortunately unable to turn invisible or phase through walls due to inhabiting a physical body. Both can theoretically physically fight ghosts and has enough time to physically fight ghosts, meaning he would be a valuable ally if he could be bothered. Lives in a graveyard. Has an ongoing ‘feud’ with Cleo, in which he puts jabs at her on the blog. Once spent a week as a (very sarcastic) floating potato.

Hermiton

Is the name of the place they all live in/near. Located in an ambiguous location in an ambiguous country, Hermiton is technically large enough to be considered a city but has Town VibesTM. Supernatural going-ons are a fairly normal part of life, and a good number of inhabitants aren’t humans. Despite this, the wider world seems mostly ignorant of the existence of ghosts, magic, etc. I’m not too sure about geography, but it’s surrounded by forest in most directions and in a warm enough climate to not have snow in the winter (so Python doesn’t, you know, freeze to death). Most people don’t tend to bat an eyelid at strange-looking people walking down the street or serving them at the store; they’re used to it by now. There are several theories as to why Hermiton specifically has so much going on when it comes to the supernatural- ley lines, secretly the resting place of some long-forgotten god, et cetera- but it’s actually more of a case of ‘people who have supernatural traits hear rumours of a place where a lot of people have supernatural traits and go there in search of answers/a place to belong’. This doesn’t exactly explain where all the ghosts came from, but hey. Nothing’s perfect.

45 notes · View notes

iampikachuhearmeroar · 4 years ago

Text

tl;dr political rant post:

it had been my goal from 12 years old to do an arts degree in philosophy (yes what a nerd- thanks to my dad playing a Great Courses philosophy dvd one morning in 2007 and my dad always taking me to the botanic gardens/the uni some weekends).

i graduated from my arts degree in 2018, with a major in english and a minor in philosophy. i was so, so lucky to even get into my communications & media degree (at first i was originally going to do marketing communications, advertising & PR)... but i realised that i was not made for business subjects- despite my mark101 tutor telling me she thought i had knack for marketing- something under this policy that i wouldn’t undertake due to the price hike for commerce/business degrees. nor was i made for a media degree. so i changed to arts & humanities.

although under this atrocious policy, english subjects are made “cheaper”- why on fucking should the rest of someone’s arts/humanities degree be so much more expensive, all depending on the fields they choose???? so you’re telling me, if i was instead to enter undergrad this year to do my english degree... that my english major would be subsidised, but my philosophy minor would be at double the cost (along with the few first year business and communications&media subjects i did), unless i forced myself to pick maths or science subjects that i would most definitely fail, no matter how much work i’d put into them??? or there’s languages- but much like maths/science- there’s the problem with my handwriting that stopped me trying french and even japanese (ironically, since it’s know for its ~painstakingly neat and orderly~ script- but my handwriting is still messy, disorderly and confusing asf).

*please note that most of this next section is just me being highly spurious and cynical. it’d probably work out fine*

but you’re also telling me that under this policy that i’d also probably have to forego my reasonable adjustments in those subjects (yes i still have trouble with my handwriting to this day) mostly because a lot of software still won’t let you write out maths problems properly or i’d have to spend twice as long trying to get a graph to work in excel or idek matlab (please teach me maths nerds)???? and most maths working out is probably better handwritten or whatever??? and that’s besides the point that i still can’t use excel at all 😂.

so with these classes then, would i be battling from day one of first year with professors to let me use a computer during exam periods (unless of course they use online/take home exam methods like philosophy)???? probably (im being very suspicious here because i don’t know how science/maths etc faculties work).

although i did get this once with one particular english professor; who used the excuse that he didn’t know how to set a computer up for exams because he had been on “sabatical for 4 years” or whatever and so “didn’t know the policies anymore”.... so then according to him it was apparently “the students job to do it.... especially since you’re in third year, miss williams”..... however, i was promptly then told by EVERY uni offical that i approached for help to do it for me.... and my other professors across my course that had done it for me, that it was in fact the PROFESSORS job/responsibility to set it up, and not the student’s??? like. help your students fuckwit professor grant??? honestly. anyway. aside from my personal struggles in the english department: let’s proceed. (this was a real incident btw).

would i be at a significant disadvantage to other students by not being able to use a computer during maths exams or science exams because of the drawing of diagrams and graphs and “showing your working”???? hell yes. would i want the professors in that department to probably condescendingly telling me all the time to “present my work neater and more precisely”? FUCK NO. it’s exactly why i avoided every maths and science subject in undergrad- even including the astronomy subject that i wanted to do- because it also meant that fellow students had to read my handwriting for practicals etc as well, that i wasn’t entirely keen on either. but i did not need the harsh reminders of “be more precise and infallible in your work presentation” that i’d had at school constantly for 11 years of maths lessons; affecting my mental health and performance in a subject during a uni semester.

moreover, that’s besides the fact that i’d flat out fail the “year 12 band 4 maths” requirements- unless they want to waive those- for first year maths/science subjects (at least basing it on my local uni).... considering that i actually skipped out on maths completely in year 12 by doing a TVET/tafe/technical college course in live theatre, production and events (which no surprises here, actually included maths anyway 😅).

because, fuck. is ANYONE seeing a trend in my study choices here? hell, i almost did a commerce/business dual degree with a tafe diploma in event management for crying out fucking loud. and you’re telling me that’s also doubled in price?? it’s obvious that i was interested in the arts & humanities and business subjects from the get-go. but under this policy- i’d be charged double for having my interest in event management, instead of say, biology (which is a subject that if it weren’t for mark scaling in my final hsc exam- i would have failed completely)??? utterly ridiculous.

i even contemplated doing a double degree with law at one point (or doing a legal studies major/minor- which is now a course at my local uni, but was not while i was there). however, law course fees have also doubled under this new policy. leaving that out of reach for me, despite that a double degree with law was out of reach for me anyway..... since my mark average was 65% and not at least 75% lol. but as if those marks averages will actually matter under this new policy.

under this bullshit policy, i’d be forced to take science/maths or even teaching (another field i had to avoid, since people can’t read my writing on a whiteboard from a distance half the time either.... besides the fact that i’m not really the ~teacher type~) subjects- all so that my degree price overall will be ”reduced”..... meaning that i would have to trade out my philosophy minor for something in maths/teaching/science (or maybe creative arts- since those fees stayed the same roughly)... instead of sticking to what i was good at: philosophy and other humanities/social science fields like sociology and history????

i understand that many people will snub me with saying “oh why did you even BOTHER going to uni if you were THAT indecisive about what you wanted to do?” which is something i’ve seen many older people saying on posts about this policy. but hell, i was 19 FUCKING YEARS OLD WHEN I STARTED UNI, FOR GODS SAKE. OF COURSE I WAS GOING TO BE FUCKING INDECISIVE ABOUT MY DIRECTION IN LIFE! because, newsflash fuckwits: not everyone has a defined career goal at 19. hell, i still don’t have one at almost 25..... since i’ll admit here, that i flunked out of my postgrad library course.... because i realised that i simply couldn’t cope with learning simple HTML, CSS and javascript coding for website design & user experience design 😂 (again help me computer wiz friends). yes, believe it or not, librarians have to know that today. and most people think that it’s just all about books (okay that was me, but i was wrong). also, if you’re wondering: postgrad library courses aren’t affected, thank god. but my point is, aren’t we meant to fuck up and pick the wrong things in life sometimes??? aren’t we meant to be indecisive about our choices in our late teens up until our mid 20s???

but now you’re telling students that their very first year of uni is practically set out for them, even for arts/humanities degrees (im not counting properly prescribed degrees such as engineering/science/communications & media (they had prescribed majors and prescribed first year subjects, which is why i left it. because i felt trapped in the prescribed marketing et al major etc); all because the government is telling them that “oh to make your first year cheaper: (A.) get good marks.... so that we don’t cancel your HECS place and (B.) pick subjects outside of the arts/humanities like science/maths/tech related subjects so that you don’t pay a whopping $14,500 for your first year of uni and will be more likely to be “job ready”. whatever the actual fuck “job ready” really means. and this all as if there ISN’T enough pressure for a 18/19 year old to succeed in their first year of uni already.

although, the one thing i’ll say is that my one year advanced diploma in marketing that i did in 2014, was $16,500. i still haven’t made any moves to pay it off. but it was constantly in the back of my mind during uni, both undergrad and postgrad. it was there as a reminder to pick cheaper subjects, so as to not greatly increase my combined hecs debt and vet-fee help debt; which is now sitting at $42,500. which under this new policy is the new price of ONE arts & humanities undergrad degree. i’d hate to be going into uni next year at 19 years old (or any age really) with that price tag on my degree.

anyway. that’s the end of my non-sensical rant. morrison and the rest of the libs etc can go fuck themselves.

#life #about me #shut up ilona #auspol

28 notes · View notes

abouttogetdicey · 6 years ago

Note

Any advice on becoming a librarian?

This one is tricky! There is a lot that goes into becoming a librarian. My partner @exor-schist wrote up a lovely post on it for public librarians (yes we’re both librarians!) but I couldn’t find it… so…Basically, each type of librarian (digital, academic, public, corporate, archivist, special collections, etc., etc.), has different requirements and specialties some, like me, are blended. This means there’s not much universal advice I can give without knowing what kind of librarian someone wants to me. But here is what universal advice I can give

:1. Volunteer at your local public library, school library, local archives, etc, etc. Understand that this DOESN’T mean you have a job. But information centers tend to hire from within and volunteering is a good way to get your foot in the door!

2. NETWORK. Network like crazy. Make friends with people in the information field. When I started, I learned all the names of all the librarians and archivists in my school and city. I went to library conventions. I still do! (They’re fun!)

3. Get a job as a page or library associate. Again, this is a great way to test the waters and climb the ladder of whatever library you want to get into. I started as a student page, then a regular page, then a library associate, then a teen specialist, then I switched to academics and became a distance education librarian and now I’m a digital and distance education librarian. I’ve been working on this since I was 19 and have climbed for 10 years to where I am!

4. Understand that the process is slow. You have to know people, network, work well, and climb. Don’t be discouraged. It’s okay to take your time. :)

5. Get your masters degree! I hate to say this, but honestly, MOST places (and this is international), won’t take you at only a bachelors degree and most schools do not offer accredited library degrees at the bachelors level. That is because this a multidisciplinary field. So get your bachelors in whatever you love (I chose history, my gf has geology), and then get your masters.

6. Make sure to get your degree from a school that is ALA accredited if you are in the US of A. If not, ask your librarian friends what schools are considered the best. I’m serious. When we were hiring a new librarian at my school, we immediately threw out any application from anyone without an accredited masters degree. Here’s the top 20 for the US as of 2017.

7. On that masters degree, make sure to get a versatile degree if you don’t end up getting a specialized degree. I got mine in MSIS or a Masters of Information Science. It means I can work in public, academic, and corporate settings in both physical and digital libraries. I can do digital archiving as well, but not physical. :( It’s very useful! And with the advent of tech and libraries and tech, I would def. caution you to get an MSIS or an MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science). I would not at this stage get just an MLS or MSLS as those are quickly becoming outdated. That said, long as your school is ALA accredited though, I wouldn’t worry too much if they only offer an MLS.

And that’s it! Feel free to ask more about libraries any time and I’ll do my best to answer or point you in the right direction!

#the dm speaks #ask the dm #librarians #library science #information science

145 notes · View notes

thisblackwitch · 5 years ago

Text

One day, I should talk about how I got a thief at an old library job fired.

Today should be that day because it’s been something. Also, I am being a touch petty, please note forewarning. Also, this is stream of thought as well so if I am glossing some details, lemme know because I wanna be clear.

So, I have dealt with discriminatory harassment at my old library job at U Mustn’t B Conscious, a college library (If you knew American college sports news last summer/fall, you know exactly what uni it is, not difficult to pick). This has popped up two new EEOC’s even (now totaling to three EEOC’s I have filed in my life). But that’s a different thing. And one that got a lawyer involved. (This now brings my lawyers count to I think 2 or 3). But the thieving! Let’s talk about that.

So, thanks to having Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), I have a work journal that I need to keep track of things. Well, had, because it got lifted after I left from work. And that was item #3. Two 3D prints I made already were stolen roughly before I was sent to a hospital for my DID.

Told higher ups, they didn’t listen because the EEOC was going on and some of them were named on it so obviously they are not interested in upholding rules, including theft.

So, I went to the uni police. The uni police were better than the library higher ups, they were interested in figuring out the theft. Buuuuuuuuuuut they went “we dunno where to start in terms of subjects”. My stuff got stolen so often, I could literally spot a pattern. (Always on my off days, gone before I come in at 4 PM).

I have a strong background in technology (I worked at NIST, the nerd part of the US government.) so I suggested, “Hey, if I can record this person in the act, would you be okay with it? Like, I want to film this person so you can just book them.” The police were okay with that. So I used my smartphone to create a motion sensor to record only interactions with my items (so I don’t burn battery or storage - that and it’s a library. Who wants to watch 7+ hours of literally nothing?)

Guess what? By the fifth item stolen, I got them on camera. Clear face and everything. If I was eviler/pettier, I’d post the video as well, it’s less than 40 seconds of someone literally blowing their entire career. The kicker? I knew this person for years. I knew them since we were both undergrad in college. They weren’t a stranger, they were someone who I thought was nice and kind for almost a decade. Come to find out, they’re sticky-fingered and because others were picking on me, they thought this was a great way to “fit in”. Yeah, I’ve been bullied since I was a child (part of how I got the DID), that’s a big reason why I got my tech skill to Level: 1984

As soon as I got a notification ping, I reviewed footage and sent straight to the fuzz. The fuzz decided to yink up thief, Kat-Nabber, and question them. Police told Kat-Nabber to not blab to the world because it could muddy the investigation. So Kat-Nabber tells uni HR (who the EEOC is also against). HR has a fit - not over the serial theft, but because I filmed someone commit theft after being dismissed and not believed. I got wrote up for “filming people without permission” as if I was filming Librarians Gone Wild.

Speed up the clock and I went from uni police to the actual police. Actual police directed me to the court house, court house sped me a prosecutor once I showed them the tape. The prosecutor wasted no time slapping charges on Kat-Nabber. U Mustn’t B Conscious may not care about serial theft but turns out the Maryland Judicial System gave some sort of a sh*t. At least when you have very damming proof.

Then Kat-Nabber gave up her job. Like, she quit roughly around the time the charges hit. And I made sure the charges were sent to her work desk. Kat-Nabber leaped over to a new state HR job, a nice paying one.

Lolz. As soon as Kat-Nabber accepted the charges and I got all the proper paperwork that dings her, I used my “Persistent” personality trait, found Kat-Nabber’s supervisor at new job as well as the head of HR at the new job. The supervisor was emailed every thing I had. The dude was astonished I had so much, Kat-Nabber was let go quick. So now, she can’t get hired in state jobs, federal jobs and she went from a clean slate to having a record.

I am posting this partly because A) I want to, Kat-Nabber isn’t the only person I fried B) I noticed my actions are having a ripple effect where some folks who follow me and knows both Kat-Nabber and me and those folks are very up in their feelings because of Kat-Nabber’s White Girl Tears. I get not wanting to believe a bad person is actually bad but Kat-Nabber didn’t get yinked on false stuff, but hard core proof.

#eeoc #mah jawb

5 notes · View notes

xprojectrpg · 3 years ago

Text

This Day In X-Project - December 16

2015: Maya makes a journal entry asking about people’s plans for Christmas. Little Paper Dolls: A few members of X-Force (and guest Jean Grey for medical and psi-support) gather to discuss a plan for extracting Emma Frost's clones from a scary secret Canadian mountaintop base. Xavin posts in xp_generation_x asking who wants to go skiing in BC with Jean-Paul after Christmas. Quentin posts a poem by Langston Hughes to his journal.

2016: Doug continues the graduation test for Hope, the pair walk away after stealing several items of jewelry. Sharon encounters Daredevil when out in Hell’s Kitchen as they both rescue a young waitress from a pair of thugs.

2017: Felicia posts an instagram picture of herself out shopping for Christmas trees. Cecilia asks for help putting together some pasteles she made using her mother’s recipe. Topaz tells people not to panic if they see an animated textbook flapping around the mansion, Stephen unleashes a swarm of bookmarks to herd it back home. Jean and Sooraya go shopping for presents for the children of the Mutant Underground.

2018: The Danger Room Paradox: Garrison, Everett and Team!Science get down to upgrading the Danger Room with new tech on a quiet Sunday afternoon, which doesn't go as expected; having worked out the extent of the disaster, plans are made to fix things; in the Harry Potter Universe, group of newly de-aged mansionites - Angelo, Alex, Hope, Marie-Ange, Jean-Phillipe and Stephen - find themselves a little… wrapped up; in The Last of Us, Laurie, Xavin, and Felicia have been dropped into an unknown location in what appears to be the middle of winter and will have to determine what's going on and who else is there, while in another spot nearby, Jean, Rahne, and Natasha are going through the same thing; in Welcome to Night Vale, it’s ...not that welcoming for Topaz, Nica, Miles, Jubilee and Warren; in Minecraft, Kyle and Terry arrive in a strange place that appears to be made of the color orange and cubes, and incidentally they are also made of cubes; Darcy and Bobby are also in a world of cubes, although theirs is more floral and forested, and Bobby identifies the world as Minecraft; Star Wars: A long time ago in a galaxy far away... Kevin, Bobbi, Wanda, Sooraya, Maya and Amanda are a group of Rebels infiltrating an Empire prison planet, with no idea of their true identities or that this is all a fiction; and in The Illiad, Meggan, Sharon, Ty, Kurt, Clea, and Logan have been dropped into the middle of the Greek camp and have to quickly take stock of the situation without being discovered; Harry Potter: No matter where you go, there’s always a troll; The Last of Us: the group now seeks shelter, clues to what has happened to the world, and where exactly they are, amd another question that looms large is why Natasha has a note indicating they need to go to Baltimore; Welcome to Night Vale:the local library serves as a good place to hide, minus the librarians; Minecraft: Terry and Kyle explore, offer commentary on the weirdness of their environment, and accidentally discover they can make things; they also discover that they can not only talk to people nearby, but to each other - which is a surprise since they're scattered all over what seems to be an infinitely large world; Star Wars: after their ‘crash landing’, the group follows former-slave-convict-now-thief Aola’Toor into the prison; The Illiad: after questioning a hapless soldier who stumbled out of his tent, the group now knows they've somehow ended up on the beaches below the city of Troy during the Trojan War, and the question now becomes how do they get back to their own reality; Harry Potter: say hello to the a-maze-ing flying Angelo as he solves the second riddle; The Last of Us: food must be found, no matter how unpleasant the job is and after narrowly escaping a zombie ambush where Rahne is bitten, the group establishes camp in an abandoned house and have split up to find transportation and supplies; Welcome to Night Vale: the group’s various issues, along with an Angel tagalong, help them get through town and find Cecil’s boyfriend; Minecraft: Bobby has set the others to making things, and nobody but him likes it, and Clarice is especially displeased; Darcy discovers that when you die, you lose your stuff - but not your life - and that she might be able to hack Minecraft with her powers, maybe, if Bobby could just remember any of the in game cheat commands; Star Wars: so far, so good - the group manage to get to the strong room and retrieve their prize, before things go horribly wrong; The Illiad: after coming up with their plan of action, the group splits into two smaller groups with Sharon and Logan off to cause the biggest distraction they can while the others work on getting to the walls of Troy; Harry Potter: Death is only temporary, uuuuuuuuuuuh right? Hope is 'killed' for the sake of solving the next riddle; The Last of Us: after a restless night in the abandoned house, the group leaves in the large SUV they've managed to start up and provision, as the faster the progress they make to Baltimore the better; Welcome to Night Vale: Cecil has been taken by a

Librarian, so our heroes go in to save him; Minecraft: Bobby is the only one who knows anything about this game, but he has a theory about how they might get to go home; It turns out Bobby's plan involves more of the same - digging, farming, building; Star Wars: the traitor is double-crossed, the former Sith is dead and the rest of the group are in a cell - has the mission completely failed?; The Illiad: Meggan and Clea have split off from Kurt and Ty to face off against Aetenor and Dolon, respectively; The Last of Us: as it gets toward sundown, the group decides to seek shelter again for the night, as they don't know the hunting patterns of the zombies and they need to look for more supplies for Rahne and for themselves.; Minecraft: Kyle and Terry and Darcy make food - and Darcy reports that she can't cheat them home by command-killing the dragon; poor Clarice - she's gotten all the teleporting of a Minecraft Enderman and all the downsides too, like not wanting to be looked at, and Terry and Clarice make armor and conversation; Star Wars: Tara’s body is hauled away to be transported back to her Inquisitor father; The Illiad: in the open plains below the city of Troy, Sharon and Logan dressed in the battle gear they had stumbled upon earlier cause a ruckus and face off against Hector and Aeneas, heroes of legend; The Last of Us:Rachel has joined their group amidst their escape, and the consensus had been to get this place in Baltimore as fast as possible to save Rahne, who's stuck in an between state of werewolf and not, and avoid any more close calls; Minecraft: Bobby explains enchanting weapons to Kyle, and Kyle does not turn himself into a parrot; it turns out some of their powers do work in this weird Minecraft world, they just have to be clever about it; Star Wars: meeting up near the hangers after their escape, the Rebels fight their way out to a shuttle, and off the planet; The Illiad: Kurt and Ty breach the walls of Troy in whatever shape or form they can then go back for the others; the walls of Troy have been breached and in the ensuing chaos everyone has to find each other again because their chance of survival is better in larger numbers, and no one wants to get accidentally left behind; Harry Potter: the final showdown, where, spoiler alert: Marie-Ange gets to stab someone; Team!Science manage to haul back the group from The Illiad, but it's not the gentlest ride, and Garrison and Ev come up with the solution of going to fetch each group themselves; Star Wars: mission accomplished, the Rebels are on their way back to base, and two strangers turn up in the shuttle while they’re in hyperspace; Minecraft: having found what they need, the group is sent down to dig obsidian and build a portal; the team goes through their portal - and finds the way home; The Last of Us: while the group debates what to do for Rahne, a solution arrives from an unexpected place; everyone retrieved, Team!Science gets down to shutting things down for good; Cecilia makes a journal entry saying I told you so.

2019:

2020:

#this day in xproject #xprpg #xproject

0 notes

suzanneshannon · 4 years ago

Text

Chapter 3: The Website

Previously in web history…

Berners-Lee, motivated by his own curiosity, creates the World Wide Web at CERN. He releases its technologies to the public domain, which enables the development of several new browsers for every operating system. Mosaic proves to the most popular, and its introduction of color images directly inline in content changes fundamentally the way people think about the web.

The very first website was about the web. That kind of thing is not all that unusual. The first email sent to another person was about email As technology progresses, we may have lost a bit of theatrics. The first telegraph, for instance, read “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.” However, in most cases, telecommunication firsts follow this meta template.

Anyway, the first website was instructive for a reason. If you were a brand new web user, it is the first thing you would see. If that page didn’t manage to convince you the web was worth sinking a bit of time into, then that was the end of the story. You’d go and check out Gopher instead. So, as a starting point for new web users, the first website was critical.

The URL was info.cern.ch. Its existence on the CERN server should be of no surprise. The first website was created by the web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, while he was still working there.

It was a simple page. A list of headers and links — to download web browser code, find out more info about the web, and get all of the technical details — was divided only by short descriptions o f each section. One link brought you to a list of websites. Berners-Lee collected a list of links that were sent to him, or plucked them from mailing lists whenever he found them. Every time he found a link he added it to the CERN website, loosely organized by category. It was a short list. In July of 1993, there were still only about 130 websites in the world.

(A few years back, some enterprising folks took it upon themselves to re-create the first website at CERN. So you can go and browse it now, just as it was then.)

As far as websites go, it was noting spectacular. The language was plain enough, though a bit technical. The instructions were clear, as long as you had some background in programming or computers. The web before the web was difficult to explain. The primary goal of the website was to prompt a bit of exploration from those who visited it. By that measure, it was successful.

But Berners-Lee never meant for the CERN website to be the most important page on the web. It was just there to serve as an example for others to recreate in their own image.

Tim Berners-Lee also created the first browser. It gave users the ability to both read — and crucially to publish — websites. In his conception, each consumer of the web would have their own personal homepage. The homepage could be anything. For most people, he thought, it would likely be a private place to store personal bookmarks or jot down notes. Others might chose to publish their site for the public, using it as an opportunity to introduce themselves, or explore some passion (similar to what services like Geocities would offer later). Berners-Lee imagined that when you opened your browser, any browser, your own homepage would be the first thing that you saw.

By the time other browsers hit the market, the publishing capabilities faded away. People were left to simply surf, and not to author, the web. For the earliest of web users, the CERN website remained a popular destination. With usage still growing, it was the best place to find a concise list of websites. But if the web was going to succeed — truly succeed — it was going to have to be more than links. The web was going to need to find its utility.

Fortunately Berners-Lee had created the URL. Anyone could create a website. Heck, he’d even post a link to it.

“Louise saw the web as a godsend,” Berners-Lee wrote in his personal retelling of the web’s history. The Louise in question is Louise Addis, librarian at SLAC for over 40 years before she retired in the mid-90s. Along with Paul Kunz, Tony Johnson, and several others, she helped create the first web server in the United States and one of the most influential websites of the early web. She would later put it a bit differently. “The Web was a revolution!” That may be true, but it wouldn’t have been a revolution if not for what she helped create.

As we found in the first chapter, Berners-Lee’s curiosity led him on a path to set information free. Louise Addis was also curious. Her curiosity led her to try to connect people to that information. She studied International Relations at Stanford University only to bounce around at a few jobs and land herself back at her alma mater working for a secret research lab known simply as Project M in 1960. Though she had no experience in the field, she worked there as a librarian, eventually moving up to head librarian. After a couple of years, the lab would go public and become formally known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC.

SLAC’s primary mission was to advance the research of American scientists in the wake of World War II. It houses a two-mile long linear accelerator, the longest in the world. SLAC recruits scientists across a broad set of fields, but its primary focus is particle physics. It has produced a number of Nobel prizes and has shared groundbreaking new discoveries across the world.

Research is at the center of the work done at SLAC. While she was there, Addis was relentless in her quest to connect her peers with research. When she learned that there wasn’t a good system for keeping track of the multitude of authors attributed to particle physics papers (some had over 1,000 authors on a single paper), she picked up a bit of programming with no formal training. “If I needed to know something, I asked someone to show me how to do a particular task. Then I went back to the Library and tried it on my own.”

A couple of years after she discovered the web, Addis would start the first unofficial tech support group for web newcomers known as the WWW Wizards. The Wizards worked — mostly in their spare time — to help new web users come online. They were a profoundly important resource for the early web. Addis continually made it her mission to help people find the information they needed.

She used her ad-hoc programming experience in the late 1960’s to create the SPIRES-HEP database, a digital library with hundreds of thousands of bibliographic records for particle physics papers. It is still in use today, though it’s newest iteration is called INSPIRE-HEP. The SPIRES-HEP database was a foundational resource. If you were a particle physics researcher anywhere in the world, you would be accessing it frequently. It ran on an IBM mainframe that looked like this:

The mainframe used a very specific programming language also developed by IBM, which has since gone into disuse. Locked inside was a very well organized bibliography of research papers. Accessing it was another thing entirely. There were a few ways to do that.

The first required a bit of programming knowledge. If you were savvy enough, you could log directly into the SPIRES-HEP database remotely and, using the database-specific SPIRES query language, pull the records you needed directly from the mainframe. This was the quickest option, but required the most technical know-how and a healthy dose of tenacity. Let’s consider this method the high bar.

The middle bar was an interface built by SLAC researcher Paul Kunz that let you email the server to pull out the records you needed. You still needed to know the SPIRES query language, but it solved the remote access part of the equation.

The low bar was to email or message a librarian at SLAC so they could pull the record for you and send it back. The easiest bar to clear, this was the method that most people used. Which meant that the most widely accessed particle physics database in the world was beset by a bottleneck of librarians at SLAC who needed to ferry bibliographic records back and forth from researchers.

The SPIRES-HEP database was invaluable, but widespread access remained its largest obstacle.

For a second time in the web’s history, the NeXT computer played an important role in its fate. For a computer that was short-lived, and largely unheard of, it is a key piece of the web’s history.

Like Tim Berners-Lee, SLAC physicist Paul Kunz, creator of the SPIRES-HEP instant messaging and email service, used a NeXT computer. When Berners-Lee called him into his office on one of his visits, Berners-Lee invited him into his office. The only reason Kunz agreed to go was to see how somebody else was using a NeXT computer. While he was there, Berners-Lee showed Kunz the web. And then Kunz went back to SLAC and showed the web to Addis.

Kunz and Addis were both enthusiastic purveyors of research at SLAC. They each played their part in advancing information discovery. When Kunz told Addis about the web, they both had the same idea about what to do with it. SLAC was going to need a website. Kunz built a web server at Stanford — the first in the United States. Addis, meanwhile, wrangled a few colleagues to help her build the SLAC website. The site launched on December 12, 1991, a year after Berners-Lee first published his own website at CERN.

Most of the programmers and researchers that began tinkering on the web in the early days were drawn by a nerdy fascination. They liked to play around with browsers, mess around with some code. The website was, in some cases, the mere after-effect of a technological experiment. That wasn’t the case for Addis. The draw of the web wasn’t its technology. It was what it enabled her to do.

The SLAC website started out with two links. The first one let you search through a list of phone numbers at SLAC. That link wasn’t all that interesting. (But it was a nice nod to the web’s origin. The most practical early use of the web was as an Internet-enabled phonebook at CERN.) The second link was far more interesting. It was labeled “HEP.” Clicking on it brought you to a simple page with a single text field. Type a query into that field, click Enter and you got live results of records directly from the SPIRES-HEP database. And that was the SLAC website. Its primary purpose was to act as an interface in front of the SPIRES-HEP database and pull down queried results.

When Berners-Lee demoed the SLAC website a couple of months later at a conference, it was met with wild applause, practically a standing ovation.

The importance was obviously not lost on that audience. No longer would researchers be forced to wrestle with complicated programming languages, or emails to SLAC librarians. The SLAC website took the low bar of access for the SPIRES-HEP database and dropped it all the way to the floor. It made searching the database easy (and within a couple of years, it would even add links to downloadable PDFs).

The SLAC website, nothing more than a searchable bibliography, was the beginning of something on the web. Physicists began using it, and it rebounded from one research lab to the next. The web’s first micro-explosion happened the day Berners-Lee demoed the site. It began reverberating around the physics community, and then outside of it.

SLAC was the website that showed what the would could do. GNN was going to be the first that made the web look good doing it.

Global Network Navigator was going to be exciting. A bold experiment on and with the web. The web was a wall of research notes and scientific diagrams; plain black text on stark white backgrounds as far as the eye could see. GNN would change that. It would be fun. Lively. Interactive.

That was the pitch made to designer Jennifer Robbins by O’Reilly co-founder Dale Dougherty in 1993. Robbins’ mind immediately jumped to the possibilities of this incredible, new, digital medium.

She met with another O’Reilly employee, Rob Raisch. A couple of years after that pitch, Raisch would propose one of the first examples of a stylesheet. At the time, he was just the person at the company who happened to know the most about the web, which had only recently cracked a hundred total sites. When Robbins walked into his office, the first thing he said to her was: “You know, you probably can’t do what you want.” He had a point. The language of the web was limiting. But the GNN team was going to find a way around that.

GNN was the brainchild of Dale Dougherty. By the early 90s, Dougherty had become a minor celebrity for experiments just like this one. From the early days of O’Reilly media, the book publisher he co-founded, he was always cooking up some project or another.

Wherever technology is going, Dougherty has a knack for being there first. At one conference early on in O’Reilly’s history, he sold self-printed copies of a Unix manual for $5 apiece just before Unix exploded on the scene. After spending decades in book publishing, he’s recently turned his attention to the maker culture. He has been called a godfather of the Maker movement.

That was no less true for the web. He became one of the web’s earliest adopters and its most prolific early champion. He brought together Tim Beners-Lee and the developers of NCSA Mosaic, including Marc Andreessen, for the first time in a meeting in Cambridge. That meeting would eventually lead to the creation of the W3C. He’d be responsible for early experiments with web advertising, basically on the first day advertising was allowed. He would later coin the term Web 2.0, in the wake of transformation after the dot-com boom. Dougherty loved the web.

But staring at the web for the first time in the early 90s, he didn’t exactly know what to do with it. His first thought was to put a book on the web. After all, O’Reilly had a gigantic back catalog, and the web was mostly text. But Dougherty knew that the web’s greatest asset was the hyperlink. He needed a book that could act as a springboard to bring people to different parts of the web. He found it in the newly-published bestseller by author Ed Krol, The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog. The book was a guided tour through the technologies of the Internet. It had a paragraph on the web. Not exactly a lot, but enough for Dougherty to make the connection.

Dougherty had recruited Pei-Yuan Wei, creator of the popular ViolaWWW browser to make an earlier version of an interactive Internet guide. But he pulled a together a production team — led by managing editor Gina Blaber — of writers, designers, programmers, and sales staff. They launched GNN, the web’s first true commercial website, in early 1993.

GNN was created before any other commercial websites, before blogs, and online magazines. Digital publishing was something new altogether. As a result, GNN didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. It operated somewhere between a portal and a magazine. Navigating the site was an exercise in tumbling down one rabbit hole after another.

In one section, the site included the Whole Internet Catalog repurposed and ported to the web. Contained within were pages upon pages of best-of lists; collections of popular websites sorted into categories like finance, literature and cooking.

Another section, labeled GNN Magazine, jumped to a different group of sortable webpages known as metacenters. These were, in the website’s own description, “special-interest magazines that gather together the best Internet resources on topics such as travel, music, education, and computers. Each metacenter contains articles, columns, reference guides, and discussion groups.” Though conceptually similar to modern day media portals, the nickname “metacenter” never truly caught on. The site’s content and design was produced and maintained by the GNN staff. Not to be outdone by their print predecessors, GNN magazine contained interviews, features, biographies, and explainers. One hyperlink after another.

Over time, GNN would expand to affiliated publications. When the Mosaic team got too busy working on the web’s most popular browser, they handed off their browser homepage to the GNN team. The page was called What’s New, and it featured the most interesting links around the web for the day. The GNN seized the opportunity to expand their platform even further.

Explaining what GNN was to someone who had never heard of the web, let alone a website, was an onerous task. Blaber explained GNN as giving “users a way to navigate through the information highway by providing insightful editorial content, easy point-and-click commands, and direct electronic links to information resources.” That’s a meaningful description of the site. It was a way into the web, one that wasn’t as fractured or unorganized as jumping in blind. It was also, however, the kind of thing you needed to see to understand.

And it was something to see. Years before stylesheets and armed with nothing but a handful of HTML tags, the GNN team set about creating the most ambitious project with the web medium yet. Browsers had only just begun allowing inline graphics, and GNN took full advantage. The homepage in particular featured big colorful graphics, including the hot air balloon that would endure for years as the GNN logo. They laid out their pages meticulously — most pages had a unique design. They used images as headers to break up the page. Most pages featured large graphics, and colored text and backgrounds. Wherever the envelope was, they’d push it a little further.

The result: a brand new kind of interactive experience. The web was a sea of plain websites with no design mostly coming from research institutions and colleges. Before Mosaic, bold graphics and colors weren’t even possible. And even after Mosaic’s release, the web was mostly filled with dense websites of scrolling text with nothing more than scientific diagrams to break it up, or sparse websites with a link, an email and a phone number. Most sites had nothing in the way of hierarchy or interactivity. Content was difficult to follow unless it was exactly what you were looking for. There was a ton of information on the web, but no one had thought to organize it to any meaningful degree. Imagine seeing all of that, day after day, and then one day you click a link and come to this:

It looks dated now, but a splash page with bold colors and big graphics, organized into sections and layered with interesting content… that was something to see.

The GNN team was creating the rules of web design, a field that had yet to be invented. In the first few years of the web, there were some experiments. The Vatican had scanned a number of materials from its archives and put them on a website. The Exploratorium took that one step further, creating the first online museum, with downloadable sounds and pictures. But they were still very much constrained by the simplicity of the web experience. Click this link, download this file, and that was it. GNN began to take things further. Dale Dougherty recalls that their goal was to “shift from the Internet as command line retrieval to the internet as this more digital interface… like a book.” A perfectly reasonable goal for a book publisher but a tall order for the web.

To accomplish their goal, GNN’s staff used the rules of graphic design as a roadmap (as philosopher Marshall McLuhan once said, “the content of any medium is always another medium”). But the team was also writing a brand new rulebook, on the fly, as they went. There were open questions about how to handle web graphics, new patterns for designing user interfaces, and best practices for writing HTML. Once the team closed one loop, they moved on to the next one. It was as if they writing the manual for flying a rocketship — while strapped to the wings and hurtling towards space.

As browsers got better, GNN evolved to take advantage of the latest design possibilities. They began to use image maps to make more complex navigation. They added font tags and frames. GNN was also the first site on the web with a sponsored link, and even that was careful and considered. Before the popup would plague our browsing experience, GNN created simple, unobtrusive, informational adverts inserted in between their other listings.

GNN provided a template for the commercial web. As soon as they launched, dozens of copycats quickly followed. Many adopted a similar style and tone. Within a few years, web portals and online magazines would become so common they were considered trite and uninteresting. But very few sites that followed it had the lasting impact GNN did on a new generation of digital designers.

Ranjit Bhatnagar has an offbeat sort of humor. He’s a philosopher and a musician. He’s smart. He’s a fan of the weird and the banal. He’s anti-consumerist, or at the very least, opposed to consumerist culture. I won’t go as far as to say he’s pedantic, but he certainly revels in the most minute of details. He enjoys lively debates and engaged discourse. He’s fascinated by dreams, and once had a dream where he was flying through the air with his mother taking in the sights.

I’ve never met Bhatnagar. I know all of this because I read it on his website. Anyone can. And his website started with lunch.

Bhatnagar’s website was called Ranjit’s HTTP Playground. Playground describes it rather well; hyperlinks are scattered across the homepage like so many children’s toys. One link takes you to a half-finished web experiment. Another takes you to a list of his favorite bookmarks arranged by category. Yet another might contain a rant about the web, or a long-winded tribute to Kinder eggs. If you’re in the mood for a debate you can post your own thoughts to a page devoted to the single question: Are nuts wood? There’s still no consensus on that one.

Browsing Ranjit’s HTTP Playgroundis like peeling back the layers of Bhatnagar’s brain. He added new entries to his site pretty regularly, never more than a sentence or two, arranged in a series of dated bullet points. Pages were laid out on garish backgrounds, scalding bright green on jet black, or surrounded by a dizzying dance of animated GIFs. Each page was littered with links to more pages, seemingly at random. Every time you think you’ve reached the end of a thread, there’s another link to click. And every once in a while, you’ll find yourself back on the homepage wondering how you got there and how much time had passed in the meantime. This was the magic of the early web.

Bhatnagar first published his website in late 1993, just a few months after the GNN website went up. The very first thing Bhatnagar posted to his website was what he ordered for lunch every day. It was arranged in reverse chronological order, his most recent lunch order right at the top.

SLAC captured the utility of the web. GNN realized its popular appeal. Bhatnagar, and others like him, made the web personal.

Claudio Pinhanez began adding daily entries to the MIT Media Lab website in 1994. He posted movie and book reviews, personal musings, and shared his favorite links. He followed the same format as Bhatnagar’s Lunch Server. Entries were arranged on the page in reverse chronological order. Each entry was short and to the point — no longer than a sentence or two. This movie was good. This meal was bad. Isn’t it interesting that… and so on.

In early 1995, Carolyn Burke began posting daily entries to her website in one of the earliest examples of an online diary. Each one was a small slice from her life. The posts were longer than the short-burst of Pinhanez and Bhatnagar. Burke took her time with narrative anecdotes and meandering asides. She was loquacious and insightful. Her writing was conversational, and she promised readers that she would be honest. “I notice now that I have held back in being frank. My academic analysis skills come out, and I write with them things that I’ve known for a long time,” she wrote in an entry from the first few months, “But this is therapy for me… honesty and freedom therapy. Wow, that’s a loaded word. freedom.“

Perhaps no site was more honest, or more free as Burke puts it, than Links from the Underground. Its creator, Swarthmore undergraduate Justin Hall, had transformed inviting others into his life into an art form. What began as a simple link dump quickly transformed into a network of short stories and poems, diary entries, and personal details from his own life. The layout of the site matched that of Bhatnagar, scattered and unorganized. But his tone was closer to Burke’s, long and deeply, deeply personal. Just about every day, Hall would post to his website. It was his daily inner monologue made public.

Sometimes, he would cross a line. If you were a friend of Justin’s, he might share a secret that you told him in confidence, or disparage you on a fully public post. But he also shared the most intimate details from his own life, from dorm room drama to his greatest fears and inadequacies. He told stories from his troubled past, and publicly tried to come to terms with an alcoholic father. His good humor was often tinged with tragedy. He was clearly working through something emotional and personally profound, and he was using the web to do it out in the open.

But for Hall, this was all in the service of something far greater than himself. Describing the web to newcomers in a documentary about his experience on the web, Hall’s primary message was about its ability to create — not to tear down — connections.

What’s so great about the web is I was able to go out there and talk about what I care about, what I feel strongly about and people responded to it. Because every high school’s got a poet, whether it’s a rich high school or a poor high school, you know, they got somebody that’s in to writing, that’s in to getting people to tell their stories. You give them access to this technology and all of a sudden they’re telling stories to people in Israel, to people in Japan, to people in their own town that they never would have been able to talk to. And that’s, you know, that’s a revolution.

There’s that word again. Revolution. Though coming at the web from very different places, Addis and Hall agreed on at least one thing. I would venture to guess that they agreed on a whole lot more.

Justin Hall became a presence on the web not soon forgotten by those that came across him. He’s had two documentaries made about him (one of which he made himself). He’s appeared on talk shows. He’s toured the country. He’s had very public mental breakdowns. But he believed deeply that the web meant nothing at all unless it was a place for people to share their own stories.

When Tim Berners-Lee first imagined the web, he believed that everybody would have their own homepage. He designed his first browser with authoring capabilities for just that reason. That dream never came true. But Hall and Burke and Bhatnagar channeled a similar idea when they decided to make the web personal. They created their own homepages, even if it meant having to spend a few hours, or a few weeks, learning HTML.

Within a couple of years, the web filled up with these homepages. There were some notable breakthrough websites, like when David Farley began posting daily webcomics to Doctor Fun or VJ Adam Curry co-opted the MTV website to post his own personal brand of music entertainment. There were extreme examples. In 1996, Jennifer Ringley stuck a webcam in her room and beamed images every few seconds, so anyone could watch her entire life in real time. She called it Jennicam, a name that would ultimately lead to the moniker cam girl. Ringley appeared on talk shows and became an overnight sensation for her strange website that let others peer directly into her world.

But mostly, homepages acted as a creative outlet — short biographies, photo albums of families and pets, short stories, status updates. There were a lot of diaries. People posted their art, their “hot takes” and their deepest secrets and greatest passions. There were fan pages dedicated to discontinued television shows and boy bands. A dizzying array of style and personality with no purpose other than to simply exist.

Then came the links. At the bottom of a homepage: a list of links to other homepages. Scattered in diary posts, links to other websites. In one entry, Hall might post a link to Bhatnagar’s site, musing about the influence it had on his own website. Bhatnagar’s own site had his own chaotic list of his favorites. Eventually, so did Burke’s. Half the fun of a homepage was obsessing over which others to share.

As the web turned on a moment of connection, the process of discovery became its greatest asset. The fantastic intrigue of clicking on a link and being transported into the world and mind of another person was — in the end — the defining feature of the web. There would be plenty of opportunities to use the web to find something you want or need. The lesson of the homepage is that what people really wanted to find was each other. The web does that better than any technology that has come before it.

At the end of 1993, there were just over 600 websites. One year later, at the end of 1994, there were over 10,000. They no longer fit on a single page on the CERN website maintained by the web’s creator.

The personal website would become the cornerstone of the web. The web would be filled with more applications, like SLAC. And more businesses, like GNN. But it would mostly be filled with people. When the web’s next wave came crashing down, it would become truly social.

The post Chapter 3: The Website appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

Chapter 3: The Website published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes

riichardwilson · 5 years ago

Text

65 Free Tools to Help You Through the Coronavirus Pandemic

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

There are more than 10,000 coronavirus cases and more than 150 deaths in the U.S., according to the CDC. The stock market has taken a hit. Businesses are losing customers, and workers are losing jobs. It has become frightening, frustrating and even maddening.

In response to the pandemic, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan recently reminded us that we can all help each other in our own ways. He has provided K-12 educators with free access to the videoconferencing platform so students can continue learning.

Inspired, I shared an idea with Jason Feifer, editor in chief at Entrepreneur: a simple, organized list of free product and service offerings from all types of companies. Access to these powerful tools can help organizations, teams and families.

He responded quickly. “I like that. Maybe it starts as a post on Entrepreneur.com?”

Boom. Here we go:

Zoom: Free videoconferencing tools for K-through-12 schools.

Slack: Free upgrades to paid plans for teams working on coronavirus pandemic research, response or mitigation. Interested teams can email a special address to get this set up, and a consultation on how best to get started with remote collaboration.

Humu: Free nudges to anyone who wants science-backed advice for how to best work remotely, partner with colleagues who are all over the place, show appreciation for those who don’t have the flexibility to work remotely (e.g. cashiers, medical personnel).

Atlassian: Free access to Cloud products for issue-tracking and project-tracking software including Jira and Confluence. Also, free access to Trello Business Class for organizing plans is offered for one year to educators at K through 12 and higher education.

Airtable: Free use of Airtable Pro plan as a modern database for any non-political, humanitarian effort tackling COVID relief. There is no time limit. It is also planning to make the service free for students too.

PandaDoc: Free e-sign plan gives companies unlimited users, unlimited document uploads, unlimited eSignatures, and payment processing.

Wrike: Free licenses of the versatile collaborative work management platform (Professional edition) to new customers for 6 months. Current customers are able to add unlimited collaborators. Webinars and advice on remote work are both on the website.

Calendly: Free Zoom and GoToMeeting integrations for their online appointment scheduling software to help remote workers stay connected. These were previously Premium tier features and will be available through June 30. Also Free premium plan access to teams working directly on COVID-19.

Smartsheet: Free templates that can be used by other organizations to build their own coronavirus preparedness dashboard, rich with CDC documentation and other resources, and related sheets and forms.

Support.com: Free tech support to anyone working or studying remotely right now.

Bill.com: Free 90-day subscription for new customers impacted by COVID-19. The cloud-based service helps small and mid-sized businesses to automate the processing of bills, generate invoices, send/receive payments and manage their cash flows.

Workable: Free use of the new video interviewing software for all customers, and access to a library of COVID-19 response content for use by HR professionals and business leaders.

Zoho: Free suite of Remotely apps until July 1. There are 11 apps in all, including ones for online meetings, training sessions, storage, project management and everyday work (in the form of word processing, spreadsheets and presentations).

Google: Free, premium version of its workplace video chat tool until July, to help businesses and schools working remotely due to coronavirus. Those features include having up to 250 participants per call, live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain, and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.

Cisco: Free license for new customers of Duo Security’s two-factor authentication tool, and current customers can go above their user limit as their employees increasingly work from home. Same deal for its web security tool Umbrella and its VPN product AnyConnect, which is available until July 1. Cisco is extending services for existing customers of Webex, its video conference platform. The offer includes unlimited usage without time restriction, support for fewer than 100 participants, and toll-free dial-in.

Comcast: Free Xfinity WiFi for everyone, with hotspots available to all, including non-Xfinity subscribers. To access the service, look for the “xfinitywifi” network name in a list of hotspots.

LogMeIn: Free site-wide licensing for 3 months of its videoconferencing solution, GoToMeeting, for eligible organizations (health care providers, educational institutions, municipalities and non-profits).

Loom: Free video recording and sharing service for teachers and students at K-through-12 schools, universities and educational institutions. They have also removed the recording limit on free plans and have cut the price for Loom Pro in half.

Microsoft: Free six-month Office 365 E1 Trial, including Microsoft Teams.

Slashtop: Free 60-day licenses to its Business Access remote access software.

Discord: Free, enhanced Go Live streaming service so that it can now support 50 simultaneous users rather than 10.

EZTexting: Free emergency text alert services to schools. Receive 100,000 free outgoing text messages for six months, access to a set of coronavirus message templates, and one-on-one consulting.

Yext: Free, new site search product, Yext Answers, for a 90-day period. Eligible businesses will be able to transform their website into a search engine capable of answering consumers’ COVID-19 specific queries in real time.

Linkedin: Free 16 learning courses that provide tips on how to stay productive, build relationships when you’re not face-to-face, use virtual meeting tools and balance family and work dynamics in a healthy way.

Hootsuite: Free access for Hootsuite Professional to small businesses and nonprofits until July 1. Helping to manage social media, and stay connected with your customers and communities.

Amazon: Free online access to sponsored computer science courses in the United States. That’s intended for learners in grades 6 through 12, and teachers who are remotely teaching this age group. Parents can also access this curriculum.

Brit.co: Free DIY classes for the next one to two weeks. Use discount code “selfcare” at checkout.

Zencastr: Free Hobbyist plans will have no recording time limits or limits on the number of people in your recording. Effective through July 1.

Threads: Free access to their collaboration tools and Pro/Team plans for all users through July 1.

Expensify: Reimbursement of up to $50 for essential goods and groceries purchased on your SNAP card.

Wave: Free financial software solutions (accounting, bookkeeping, invoicing) for small businesses to help with cash flow — which becomes increasingly important during economic turmoil. In response to COVID-19, Wave has reduced paid services where possible to active customers, in an effort to provide financial relief during a time of need.

Jamm: Free audio-visual communication tool used by remote and distributed teams. You can quickly record videos or do a live call with your team. Available for 3 months.

Carto: Free visualization software for organizations fighting COVID-19.

Crowdmark: Free access to its online grading and analytics platform until May 31.

Epic: Free remote access of its reading platform to elementary educators and librarians until June 30, with no credit card required. Students may access the company’s digital library, which has 35,000-plus books, read-to-me and audiobooks, videos and quizzes. Teachers and librarians can stay connected to their students by assigning books or collections and monitoring their progress.

ClassTag: Free communication platform available to help districts and schools communicate with their families. The software sends messages through SMS, email, apps and the web and automatically translates them into one of 55 languages. The platform can also be used to post videos, assignments and other resources for students to access at home and allow users to run virtual lessons with a videoconferencing tool.

McGraw-Hill: Free resources for out-of-school learning to help K-12 teachers make the transition to remote instruction.

Scholastic: Free 5 days’ worth of content and 15 additional days is on the way.

Age of Learning: Free at-home access for families at affected schools to ABCmouse, a learning resource for ages 2 to 8.

Listenwise: Free access to the Listenwise platform that supports distance learning by allowing you to roster your students, make online customized written assignments, and assign multiple-choice autos-cored listening quizzes. This will give you and your students the ability to learn through May 31, or until your school reopens.

Peloton: Free 90-day trial of its subscription workout app as more gyms shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The fitness freebie doesn’t require a Peloton-branded bike or treadmill. Users can choose from classes such as yoga, meditation, strength training and more.

U-Haul: Free self-storage for 30 days to all college students who have been impacted by schedule changes at their universities.

TripIt: Free 6-month licenses to their Tripit Pro flight tracking service.

UrbanSitter: Free parent subscription for two months during the COVID-19 outbreak. Parents can find trusted childcare help to support them as they work from home during this period. Every sitter is background checked and UrbanSitter provides parents with as much information as possible to make informed decisions.

Dialpad: Free two months of its cloud-based phone system, Dialpad Talk Pro. This also includes videoconferences and UberConference Business.

1Password: Free business accounts for the first 6 months. Manage your workforce from anywhere, and safely share logins and other important resources with remote workers.

Vidyard: Free secure video messaging to enhance internal communications for all businesses.

Cloudfare: Free Teams products to small businesses and remote workers to operate securely and easily. This policy will continue for at least the next 6 months.

Panopto: Free three-month access to capture and distribute video content for businesses, universities, colleges and schools will enable employees and students to continue learning and working remotely.

OneLogin: Free access to the Trusted Experience Platform

for educators who are moving to a virtual learning environment in light of health concerns. The free platform, consisting of single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA) and certificate-based authentication, will deliver secure virtual experiences for all educators K through 12, colleges and universities.

SentinelLabs: Free cybersecurity platform SentinelOne Core between Monday, March 16 through Friday, May 16. SentinelOne’s cloud-based platform seamlessly scales, making it well suited to protect both businesses and employees rapidly transitioning to a work-from-home environment.

Waterfall Security: Free Remote Screen View product licenses available to customers whose vendor personnel or key employees are no longer able to travel to industrial and critical infrastructure sites. Remote Screen View sends real-time images of industrial workstations to a web server that remote vendors can access.

OneClick: Free remote access Basic Starter Package for the next three months to assist those working remotely.

8×8: Free video meetings to all users. Offers 80+ local dial-in numbers (11 toll-free) from 55+ countries and meetings of up to 50 participants without any time restrictions.

Bloomz: Free premium version of its communication service to all schools through June 30. The software allows users to communicate updates in real-time to parents and students; and share lessons, student work and feedback.

HR Acuity: Free version of its SaaS solution to help businesses manage employee issues related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. The limited edition provides employee documentation and tracking functionality that will equip businesses to monitor the people impact of the crisis. The limited edition will be available through at least July 1 to businesses with more than 100 employees.

Avid: Free, temporary licenses of creative tools to qualified media enterprise and educational customers. Starting March 16 through April 17, users who must work remotely because their facility has been closed may obtain 90-day licenses free of charge for Media Composer | Ultimate, Pro Tools, Pro Tools | Ultimate and Sibelius | Ultimate. In addition, any student of an institution who uses our products and can no longer attend school and/or access school facilities can receive a 90-day license of the same products.

TechSmith: Free licenses to TechSmith Snagit screen capture software and the TechSmith Video Review software through June 30.

BlueJeans: Free access to videoconference service to first responders and NGOs for 90-days.

Adobe: Free home access to Creative Cloud apps is available by request of students and educators until May 31. Adobe also offers free 90-day access to Adobe Connect for web conferencing until July 1.

DropBox: Free DropBox Business and HelloSign Enterprise subscriptions for a three-month period to nonprofits and NGOs that are focused on fighting COVID-19. Organizations working to stop the virus or providing relief to those impacted are encouraged to apply.

Box: Free secure file sharing and collaboration platform for 3 months. The offer is for the Business plan and includes unlimited storage, mobile access, and advanced user and security reporting.

Mailchimp: Free Standard accounts to eligible groups sending critical public health information about COVID-19 through June 30.

SurveyMonkey: Free questionnaire templates written by survey research experts to gather data/feedback from employees, customers and broader groups impacted by the coronavirus.

Salesforce: Free access to technology for emergency response teams, call centers, and care management teams for health systems affected by coronavirus.

Check back soon because we’ll keep this list updated. You can also see all links and submit new free offers here.

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/65-free-tools-to-help-you-through-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/613221212725837824

0 notes

scpie · 5 years ago

Text

65 Free Tools to Help You Through the Coronavirus Pandemic