#problem-driven project learning (not just 'doing group projects' but real projects of interest with multiple means of representation)

[anonprotagging]

man there’s like.   almost nothing better than closing a dense 400-page textbook for the last time and knowing you’ll never have to open it for a grade again. the relief is staggering

[imagineitbetter]

CTEC502- Week 1 Reflection

Intro to Creative Technologies

Who am I?

I am a person who is appreciative of development in overall, the vast growing world trends, cultures, technologies, social changes, social interactions, our believes and thinking, what can be learned and/or achieve from these, as individuals and collectively; I would grant most of my interests to one of my main characteristics, curiosity.

I am yet to define myself better, thus the choice to start a career path on the Creative and Technology field, I believe is a good start where I can exploit my potential best.

After read the chapter the four creative hats of the book The Plenitude : Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff, by Rich Gold, John Maeda, and John Antonelli, I would say I wear the Designer hat the most, as I enjoy being in a business environment, working on projects with teams and alone for users/costumers, I wear the pop and folk subhats of the Artist one at times, I’m always interested on what’s new in society how can I embrace and express myself and others, also I love DIYs for my own entrainment and form of expression.

 What is Creative Tech?

Is a combination of different progressive fields such as Creativity, innovation, arts, technology, engineering and entrepreneurship put to work collectively for the invention of new projects, that can bring an impact in the world and push us further to challenge ourselves on what today’s and tomorrow’s modern world looks like.

It gives an opportunity for people to break the standards, to who may have likes in multiple fields, to explore them all and create a versatile profile and bright future, provided the high demand on The Creative and Technological sector.

 How am I using my 10 hours this week for ICT?

I am ensuring to review the lecture slides, watching videos or other useful sources advised and writing down my thoughts.

Weekdays evenings and Weekends are destinated to my studies while week days I will be at class or work.

 How do a reflect?

Reflecting is a skill I need to improve on, especially on my studies, it has been a few years since I was a former student last.

Normally I would reflect on my life once at month or so, review what and how I am doing, add mental notes on what I need to improve on, reminders when I am losing track of my goals and what else I can add to my life.

 How do I learn?

While I am in independent person, I appreciate rules, methods and following them, most of the time, I learn best watching and imitating step by step, working in a group, discussing ideas, practice makes the master!

Taking notes is important, of what I read, discuss in class and with my peers classmates. Having English as my second language, Spanish is my native language but not often spoken or used on my studies, the improvement of my communication skills is a constant process.

Internet is my most useful tool, I would have ten different pages open over the same topic until I’m satisfied with a definition, for example.

However regardless of the language, if there is something, I develop a passion for, I will engage better, be more attentive, driven and resourceful.

 How do I want to make a difference?

Living in the world we live today, fortunate to be in this fast growing era, I often reflect on the fact that I am not doing enough, for me, for my loved ones, my future, OUR future, I watch TED talks and feel so inspired for the so many who are doing what they can to make a difference whether to help a small community or a whole country and then all I want is to be one of them.

I strongly believe education is fundamental for our world, I want to study, learn as much as I can, put ideas on practice, have the power to consciously choose different and exciting jobs in companies or even having my own that truly contribute to the world positively, educate and inform in everyway possible.

 Feasible + Desirable + Viable: What does this mean to me?

Three criteria applicable to many problem solving situations

Feasible

Taking into account what it already exists, how can it be best utilised to solve existing or future issues

Desirable

Finding out What is the ultimate goal and targeting the real needs for it to be successful

Viable

Ensure it benefits both ways. Is it profitable and sustainable?

 How is the future shaped?

At the speed and spread we are growing it is uncertain how it is shaped, hope keeps us all going, the future is shaped on hopes and how fast can hopes become or demonstrate facts , how facts can reach out everywhere and stay facts, those are based on different factors such as Socially, cultural, environmental, political, advanced (Technology, science, engineer, e.t.c).

On a worrying note, power and money in today’s world continues to be one of the biggest factors on how the future is shaped and it does not benefit us all equitably.  

On a reassuring note, the power of people come together has demonstrated to be a strong force against oppression.

How do technology and humans shape each other?

Humans invented technologies and every invention there is, out of necessity mainly,  there are extraordinary people working together making things happen helping the world evolve, expanding limitlessly, what we thought impossible just few years ago are now facts, cures, vaccines, vehicles, e.t.c., and is ascending at high speed, thanks to technology a human’s tool, we can continue growing offering better chances to our today’s and future’s generations. Technology offers us the world but the world is run by humans so it can only happen what we make happen.

There are more problems in the world than solutions and not all are contributed to technology but definitely all involves humans in a way or the other.  

[samsondogo]

🚨Update!!!🚨

EasyFi Network partners with cybersecurity firm Halborn for complete audit & total security

Scope to include Full Smart Contracts Audits, Security Practices, DevOps procedures for the complete protocol infrastructure

EasyFi Network has partnered with Halborn Security to engage them as the official auditor & security advisor for providing a 360° & holistic security advisory for our complete protocol infrastructure on Polygon, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.

This is with reference to our earlier announcement on partnering with top audit firms to audit not just all the protocol smart contract codes but also conduct a complete audit of all the security practices for enhanced security on EasyFi.

Read here: EasyFi Reinstatement Plan

Halborn brings deep industry experience in multiple blockchain protocols and cryptographic standards in performing extensive security audits and testing.

The team has already started a complete security architecture audit, identify and prioritize focus areas, and then work on a weekly plan thereafter. A brief of the areas of work is given below.

Full Audit

Following the security incident with EasyFi on April 19th, we have examined the need for multiple areas of improvement and focus with respect to security practices. This includes providing a full measure of security enhancements not only for our protocol, its smart contracts and code in general, but also establish company-wide security practices, procedures and processes for all future needs for the growth of the protocol.

Please note that a full and comprehensive audit is being conducted for our entire protocol infrastructure on all three blockchains we are currently present on viz. Polygon, Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.

In addition, this will not be just a one-time engagement between Halborn and EasyFi but an ongoing and sustained engagement henceforth.

The Audit and Advisory scope

Some of the regular working scope of our overall security program with Halborn will include the following:

a. General Cybersecurity Practices — For EasyFi protocol, it is imperative that we have a process-driven security strategy and design that is built to reduce risks. So essentially we need to be suitably protected and free from cyber attacks and other related problems. So in general, we need to:

find the most efficient way to protect the system, networks, software, data and information systems against any potential attacks,

implement vulnerability testing, threat analysis, and security checks & procedures,

perform research on cyber security criteria, security systems, and validation procedures,

plan and design healthy security architectures for any IT project,

investigate and provide security solutions using business standard analysis criteria

b. Holistic Infrastructure Risk Assessments — We are building security in all facets of our business. Halborn will carry auditing, advising, and validating that all technology,

people, and processes are planned and implemented securely. We will initiate some of the best practices used in this space and build them into our security processes & practices.

c. Penetration Testing — In a penetration testing environment, Halborn will perform deep security inspections to identify critical vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by adversaries and threat actors in the real world. We will simulate the activities and tactics typically performed by attackers to reduce the protocol’s exposure.

d. Smart Contract Audits & Security Testing — This is a vital process that needs to be conducted almost regularly as we continue to build and expand our protocol with new products and services. The smart contract analysis conducted by Halborn will comprise an understanding of the code structure, ensure that the code adheres to quality standards, and is free of vulnerabilities and reveals errors much in advance and before public release.

e. Establishing DevSecOps Best Practices — As we restart and begin our new growth journey, we have realized that we need to build mature processes and procedures for our DevOps as well. We will extend our global protocol security practices to our technology sphere as well. We will use Halborn’s expertise for advice on automation, infrastructure codes, cloud hosting options, and other best practices for continuous integration and continuous deployment as and when needed.

Future Perfect

We would like our followers and community to know that we are constantly working on improving our processes for the reinstatement of our protocol. Our partnership with Halborn is just one of the many that we will be doing in this space to ensure that we have a secure protocol for the future. With a brilliant auditor & security partner backing us up, we can focus confidently on building our products and services as per our plans and in the best interest of our users.

About Halborn Security

Halborn is an award-winning, elite cybersecurity firm working with blockchain companies. Some of Halborn’s existing clientele are Coinbase, Stellar, Bancor and BlockFi. Unlike other firms in the space, Halborn focuses on full stack security, DevSecOps, as well as advanced penetration testing of the web apps that interact with smart contacts. The firm also provides exceedingly thorough analysis of a blockchain application’s smart contracts in order to correct design issues, errors in the code, or identify security vulnerabilities. They also perform both manual analysis and automated testing to make sure smart contract applications or DeFi platforms are ready for mainnet.

Website | Blog | Twitter

Stay tuned for more news & updates on our Telegram channel and join the official group. You can also follow us on Twitter.

To learn more about $EASY and EasyFi, please go through Easyfi whitepaper and other articles on this publication.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #291

“clothes trailing from the backdoor, to the bedroom, and i don’t even know your name.”

What was the last health scare you had? So I got blood tests done recently to check multiple things, and I got pretty nervous when my doctor stood beside me going through the numbers and what they meant. I was afraid she was going to tell me I had diabetes (runs in the fam, and my diet hadn't been great) or something, but I was fine. What is your favorite food to cook? Something in the microwave lmao. Do you listen to bluegrass music? Ew. What was the last novel you read about? Well it' s part of a series so it'd be hard to explain briefly... but dragons. That'll do ig, lol. If there is a tree right outside your window, what kind is it? There's a small one. Idk what it is. What is your favorite filling for a piece of chocolate? Caramel. What is your favorite thing to draw? If you take a look at my work history... I apparently love drawing meerkats screaming for one reason or another lmao. Do you like abstract art? Not very much. There are of course exceptions to this, but it's definitely not my favorite and sometimes doesn't even feel like "art" to me. Would you ever want to be a painter? No. My Painting course in school taught me it's too damn stressful, the idea of messing up. Even though it's technically fixable. There's just a lot about painting I don't like. I'd much rather draw and color traditionally. What is your passion? Some of my biggest consists of gay rights (or really just equal rights as a whole), meerkats, pacifism, photography, just art in general, stuff like that. I feel things very deeply, so there's really a lot. What fascinates you? NATURE!!!!!!! SO MUCH ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Do you have art on your walls? In my room, I have three of my meerkat projects on the wall with my meerkat collection, and my Pyramid Head/Halo of the Sun overlap drawing is with my Silent Hill stuff. What kind of collection would you like to start? I have a decent amount of stuff, but I really would love to pump up my SH collection. It has SO much merch that I would die for, stuff is just mad expensive. If I was to start a new collection, bitch I need Markiplier stuff so bad, I'm too awkward to ask for that shit for holidays 'n stuff. ;;_;; Do you enjoy the sound of birds chirping? I sure do. If you had the money, would you travel the world? I feel like I'd go to less locations than most people you could ask this question, but I'd definitely go places, yeah. If you could travel the world, which country would you want to go to first? South Africa. Make my meerkat dreams come true. :') Do you get drunk? I haven't before, and I don't actually aim to when I drink (which is very rare) and I'm apparently no lightweight, so I doubt I ever will. Don't feel like I'm missing out, honestly. Do you get high? Nah. Have you ever used a prescription medication to get high? No. Does sunlight make you happier? Guys. This is science. I used to hate the sun so much, but it's good for you. Open your windows on a clear day; your body will thank you. It takes getting used to, but please, don't coop yourself up in the dark. Do you live a boring life? My life is excruciatingly boring. Like not to sound depressing, but half the time I wish I wasn't even alive because I'm so bored lmao. Have you ever gotten soap in your mouth for cursing? Do you think that’s right to do to kids who curse? No, but it's been threatened upon me. I don't support it, no, but then again I don't believe in traditional "profanity." My hypothetical four-year-old could say "that fucking hurt" in our own household, and just a simple word indicating (s)he was really in pain wouldn't faze me for a blink. I do believe out of respect though, that you should educate your children when "profanity" isn't allowed, like in school and such. You don't shove potentially toxic shit into your kid's mouth to teach them something. What age do you think is appropriate for kids to start watching horror movies with lots of gore? This definitely depends on the child. Are they spooked easily? How mature are they? Do they understand what's not to be replicated? It would vary with the film, too. Do you have any wind chimes outside your house? How many? No, but I'd love to. Wind chimes are great. Do you have a flat stomach? Would you ever wear a belly shirt to show it off? I hate my stomach more than I do any other part of my body, so guess. Would you ever get a sleeve or a half sleeve on your arm (we’re talking about tattoos)? omfg hell YES Do you think your biological parents love each other? They're long-divorced and Dad's been remarried for a long time while Mom only has negative shit to say about him, so like... What's one movie you’re dying to see but haven’t had the chance to see yet? *Dying* to, I don't know if one exists. Birds of Prey probably tops my want-to-see list, though. Harley moving past Joker? Girl you fuckin go ilu. What’s the biggest promise someone’s ever made to you? Did they keep it? To never leave me because of my illnesses. Nope, he sure didn't. Does thunder & storms scare you? Nah, not usually. It's funny, I was TERRIFIED of them as a kid, especially if I wasn't with my mom, but now I find them beautiful and sometimes even relaxing. Now, wind, I fucking hate wind. I associate bad winds with tornadoes, so fuck outta here w/ that. Google, Bing, or Yahoo? Google. Do you sing in front of people? NO. Who are you the most uncomfortable around? Groups of older men. Are your parents overprotective? No. A recent creation that you’re proud of? I took family pictures for a repeat client recently, and I'm really happy with how some came out. Who’s your favorite comedian? Living, I'm unsure. It was John Pinette. What makes you squeamish? Vomit and fecal matter top the list. Do you have any online friends that you wanna keep, but not meet? Maybe a couple that I don't know too well? Should cloning ever be allowed to happen? No. I see a lot of potential problems with that should it become a serious thing. Who would you live with if you got kicked out tomorrow? Probably my dad. What’s a pet your parents never let you have when you were a kid? A snake. I was eventually allowed though obviously, and now Mom loves Venus, though she won't hold her. Who do you wish you could change, if anyone? It's not my job to change anyone else. You have to want to change. Has your house ever been broken into? No, but my childhood home almost was by a gang. My older sister and her best friend were home alone at the time. Thank fuck they didn't get in, but they left a gang flag on our porch. Would you consider yourself a good flirt? I have no idea. What color do you wear most often? You mean to tell me black isn't the only primary color in people's wardrobes? Do you like your hair? Disregarding the fact it gets oily way too fast, yes. Have you ever driven while under the influence? No, I would absolutely never. Did you enjoy your last kiss? Yeah. Would you ever take boudoir photos for a significant other? (or have you?) Considering I literally love boudoir, I would if I didn't hate the fuck outta my body and would be too embarrassed to ever do it. What is your biggest guilty pleasure? Maybe makeup guru channels lmaooo. What is a movie that you thought you would hate but actually ending up enjoying? I'm unsure. I don't really go into watching a movie I think I'll hate, especially when I watch so few movies to begin with. Do you like where you live? I'm not a fan of the suburbs, but it's a better place than where we were. Are you a jealous person? I'm learning that apparently I might be, at least sometimes. Is there anyone you want to fix things with? There are a few. Last time you walked further than a block? I couldn't tell you. I walk a few feet (that's not an exaggeration) and am in pain because of the muscle atrophy in my legs. Is it easy for you to accept loss? NO. NUH-UH. NOPE. Do you get dessert normally while out to eat? No. Who was your first kiss? Jason, my first "real" boyfriend. Have you ever found a stray dog & found its owners? Not that I recall. Would you ever tell your mom about the things you’ve done sexually? Not everything, no. When was the last time you told someone you love them? Last night. Who was the last person you talked to last night in person before bed? Ma. When was the last time that you were genuinely happy? Good damn question. Have you ever dyed your hair? Plenty of times. Have you ever fallen asleep with the last person you kissed? Yeah. When was the last time you changed in front of someone? I don't know; when you hate your body enough, you'll do a lot to avoid that. Last person you kissed, have you cried in front of them? Yes. Ever dated someone who was gorgeous but they had a conceited personality? No. A conceited asshole is the last kind of person I'm dating. Would you prefer a kiss on the cheek or neck? Well I mean what's the vibe lmao Do you like to cuddle? Yeah, if we're a close couple and it's not too hot. Have you ever suspected anyone of cheating on you? Nah. Could you ever be friends with the person who hurt you most in life? I wish we could, but even if he was willing, I don't think "friendship" is possible between us. What is something “cheesy” that you own? Ha, I have this feminine-looking "she believed she could so she did" wall decor thing... I can't remember if I bought it or if it was gifted. What is something that gets your creative juices flowing? MUSIC!!! What drink are you most likely to order at a bar? Some kind of margarita. What is the most interesting class that you took in high school or college? Mythology, I guess? When was the last time that you’ve ever played Spin the Bottle? I never have to begin with. If you were an adult film star or a stripper, what would your stage name be? I can't even try to entertain this question. Even if I WANTED to be one, I would never be hired. I couldn't seriously think of a name. Have you ever wanted to be a cheerleader? No, not even when I was one as a kid lmao. Have you ever been dumped? What was the reason for it? Yeah. The first one, he couldn't handle my depression anymore. With my last partner, we kinda had a mutual agreement that to save us from potential later heartbreak, we needed to work more on ourselves right now. What was the last R-rated movie you watched? Hm. Idk. Have you ever asked someone out? Yes. Have you ever had lice? No. What is the most childish thing that you still do? I mean, with RP, you could argue that I still "play pretend." Have you ever watched a movie you knew you shouldn’t? As a kid, I'm pretty sure I was not supposed to see whatever Scary Movie film it was when I did, aha. Have you ever wanted to try LARP (Live Action Role-Play)? Nah. I'm awkward enough explaining I just write it. If you could go back in time and erase one thing you said or did, what would it be? The "thanks for sending me to the hospital" message to Jason. Has your boyfriend or girlfriend ever embarrassed you? Jason did before, if we're counting past partners. Have you ever thought about cheating on your partner? I never thought of that in any relationship, no. Have you ever been caught checking someone out? Not to my recollection. Not that I even do that much. Have you ever cried because you missed your parents so much? Oh, absofuckinglutely as a little kid. I had BAD separation anxiety from my mom. Have you ever posted something on social media that you regret? OH BOY HAVE I!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Have you ever ding dong ditched someone? No. Which is worst: Snakes, scorpions, or spiders? I adore snakes. Some spiders scare me, especially if they catch me by surprise. Scorpions aren't native here, so I've actually never come across one, so I'd probably be more curious than frightened. Is there an attic and/or a basement in your house? An attic, yeah. Have you ever been bitten by a tick? Has anyone not? Well, I suppose this depends on your environment. Playing outside in the country as a kid a lot, and especially walking through tall grass to reach fishing spots with Dad, I've had lots. I'm terrified of parasites so those were never fun times. What color is your mom’s car? White. Have you ever had a bird or a squirrel in your house? No. How high off the ground is your bed? The average, ig. What is the cutest breed of dog? That's such a hard question, but I think I tend to lean towards pugs, though I don't support breeding them or any other type that is a medical catastrophe. What is something other people say you’re good at but you think you’re not? Holding a conversation. I call BS. What does your bedside lamp look like? It's a creamy color with a floral design. It was already here at the house when we moved in. Do you like your neighbors? I don't know them. Does your room need to be cleaned? I need to finish decorating it... and dust the dresser. What was the last bug you saw? Ugh, a fucking ant. This house has had an ant problem before, and now they're showing up in my room here and there. Do you place any value in gender roles? Literally zero. Are your platonic relationships just as valuable as romantic or family ones? Well, I suppose it would depend on the person. How strong is that platonic relationship? Are you in love? Do you want to be? I don't think *in* love anymore, no; I reasoned myself out of that. I think most people WANT to be in the name of companionship, and being a pretty hopeless romantic, your wild guess would probably be right. Would you be happy with a life without romance? I'd live. Are you religious? Do you think your religion is ‘correct’? No. If you aren’t religious, do you wish you were? Why? Nope. Religion only ever brought me confusion, pain, and frustration. Are your choices fated or of your own free will? I am very much a believer in free will and that you sculpt your own fate. Was your childhood happy? For the most part. What are you missing from your life? Excitement. Would you fight for your country? Do you feel a sense of loyalty to your nation? No. And if my country did something fucked up, I wouldn't stand with the masses just because I live here. What’s the latest YouTube channel you’ve discovered and binge-watched? Snake Discovery, like, hardcore. Does it snow where you live? Every now and then, but it's super rare for the snow to stick, and it's maybe even rarer that we get a good or fun amount. Do you think your hair looks better long or short? UGGGGHHHHHH I AM SO MUCH HAPPIER W/ SHORT HAIR. Do you enjoy editing photos on your phone? Not really on my phone, no. I don't have good image quality on my phone, so editing tends to make it worse. What’s your favorite thing to do on your phone? Play Pokemon GO if I'm actually in a place with spawns. Which season do you wish would last longer? Sigh, autumn. At least here, the colorful phase is pretty short. It's like... green leaves one day, a beautiful display for a week, then the trees are bare. It's still my favorite season, though. Do you have neat handwriting? Yeah. Did you dream of becoming famous as a kid? Nah. Do you get on Facebook every day? Pretty much. What was your favorite girl group when you were growing up? Spice Girls, duh. Would you ever consider naming a child after a family member? No. I've got nothing against people who do, but I've just never seen the appeal of it at all. I would want my hypothetical child to have their completely own identity.

[theonyxpath]

WOW! What a weekend!

And it started with our Legendlore Kickstarter funding on Friday! Now we’re moving into Stretch Goals – so please, if you haven’t already, check it out! The link is below in the Kickstarter section!

And and, to get you started, here’s a review of the free PDF of the complete text for the book linked on the KS site: https://thetabletopalmanac.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/rpg-reviews-legendlore-manuscript-preview/

Of course, this leaves the rest of the weekend, which just happened to consist of the first-ever Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention!

What a fun time!

We really didn’t know how folks would respond, but now that the three days of panels and gaming are done, I can say that our community was in turns hilarious, supportive, giving, excited, and energized. And that energy really flowed right back into all the events and energized all of us!

I mean, we’re still tired as all get out – who’d have thought that a con I could attend from my own house would do that? – but pretty sure we’re all still feeling the love, too.

Just to pull the giving part out for a second, we are absolutely thrilled that our charity goals were blasted through sometime mid-con, and we’ll be donating over a thousand dollars to each of our excellent causes: The Bodhana Group, and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund!

Now, back to the whooped by the con part, we are and I am, so today I’m just going to pull out some impressions of the events from a bunch of us who normally would have had our Monday Meeting today – we rescheduled it for later this week.

SCENES FROM A VIRTUAL CON:

Matthew: The Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention was the first con I helped organise, and while it had its share of stresses in the setup, it came to excellent fruition due to the fantastic teamwork of everyone working hard behind the scenes and amazing engagement from viewers, panelists, players, and those who donated to our charities and took advantage of our sales on onyxpathcon.com

RichT: I started us off on Friday night with the Opening Keynote speech, and then just sort of chatted with Matt McElroy, Dixie Cochran, Eddy Webb, and Matthew Dawkins about what was coming with the con.

For me, I then rolled into my first game, I played one per day, which was the first Actual Play of Exalted Essence. It really did run both fast and smoothly, and all of the various Exalted types we were playing had their times to shine. I was able to put a different, more easy-going, pie-eating, spin on my bear-totemed Lunar who still wound up grappling with the big bad and bear-hugging them in place for Danielle’s Solar to practically one-shot the sucker!

Ian: Convention was great, despite a few hiccups. I was on two streams early on: one Friday evening and one Saturday morning, and then the rest of the con was “free.” Travis and the GG crew were all-stars. Travis couldn’t get Nightbot working for a bit so I took over the random prize drawing for a few streams. I was often juggling two different streams in different monitors to help keep dialogue going in chat. Kudos to everyone, especially those of you who worked multiple panels and games in a single day.

RichT: In fact, the panel Ian refers to on Saturday morning was the “What’s Up With Onyx Path?” panel that started off the day at 9am. This is a panel where a bunch of developers and I talk about upcoming projects for their lines, and answer questions. Eddy and I started doing them about a decade ago when it was “What’s Up With White Wolf?”, but changed the name for obvious reasons after Onyx Path appeared.

During that panel, a couple of things came up: Matthew teased that we might very well do They Came From (the Old West!, or something more flavorful that fits the genre) as the third They Came From game, and Ian talked about Trinity Continuum: Aeon Mission Statements, a book all about the organizations in the setting that aren’t the Psi-Orders. We also noticed that some folks in the chat were new to Onyx Path and what we create, so that was unexpected but welcome news!

Then, I played my second game of the con, which was a sneak preview of Scion: Demigod! Neall took us through a voyage to the Grecian Afterlife, using the Ready Made Characters from Heroes of the World and I got to play a stern Horace Farrow ala Sam Elliott, while Steffie cut up many, many things with Yukiko’s Grass-Cutter Sword. Then, another panel on Community Content and why it rocks wrapped up my Saturday.

Matthew: I didn’t encounter one instance of bad behaviour in chat or anything dubious discussed on screen in games or on panels, and I attended most that I could as a viewer, if I wasn’t an active participant.

Viewership of panels and games peaked at around 250 to 300 people at one time for a couple of the shows, and bottomed out at around 50 people. Those are good figures. Our subscriptions and follows on Twitch rocketed, with many subscriptions being gifted by viewers and even more just being purchased or acquired via Amazon Prime.

My own highlight is impossible to choose between the games and panels I ran or appeared on, though the “Create Your Best Character” panel, which I suspected would be a sleeper, turned into an excellent talk on not playing harmful stereotypes and break out of dangerous tropes.

Eddy: The convention was great for me. My scheduling was a little odd, and I ran into one minor technical issue, but otherwise it went smoothly and it seemed like people in the chat were excited and appreciative. I felt like we got to dig into topics we aren’t able to do in normal convention settings, and attendance was definitely higher than usual for panels at other shows. I also heard that people had a good time watching the games or playing in ad-hoc games all weekend. I know there were some problems on the back-end of getting this all together, but I don’t think any of our attendees noticed anything but a nice, polished experience.

RichT: Sunday started out just like Saturday, with the second “What’s Up With Onyx Path?” panel, although with a different set of developers. The big news was when Eddy ratted out that he was working on Squeaks in the Dark, the mice/rats supplement for Realms of Pugmire!

I then had my second panel on Sunday, the “Art of Onyx Path” one, where Mirthful Mike Chaney joined three of our freelance artists and I in discussing just how illustrators work for us: how they submit their work, how they are contacted, how art notes work, how artists work, and what sort of music do we listen to while doing illustrations. Lots of great questions from the audience, and a wide range of experience within the panel, made it really interesting.

RichT: Then my Sunday game was the first public playtest of They Came From Beyond the Grave! run by Matthew, and featuring Dixie’s Rose Thorne, a driven vampire hunter with attitude, and 70s hair. She teamed up with B. Dave Walters’ smoooth street investigator to blast the ever-lovin’ hell out of evil cultists, while Ian Mueller’s exorcist (sorta) shot the big bad between the eyes with Rose’s derringer, and my slightly odd professor tried to save as much weird-science lab equipment as he could. Science! We left the haunted house as the superimposed fire effect began to devour it, fortunately for all involved (except the dead 70s prog-rock star sacrificed by the cultists).

I immediately had to log into my last event, but what a special event it was! Added late in the proceedings as we had to work within a lot of people’s schedules, I was thrilled to sit down with a bunch of my old co-workers at the original White Wolf in a “Memories of WW” panel with Bill Bridges, Rich Dansky, Ethan Skemp, Mike Tinney, and my old go-to designer for graphics, Matt Milberger.

Much reminiscing occurred, interposed with questions from the chat, that pretty much focused on our time from the early 90s to the early 2000s, although we did chat a bit about the late, lamented WoD MMO, as most of us worked on that in one capacity or another. Mike talked about how he cozened us an arcade version of Dark Stalkers for our little lunchroom, and we had fond memories of the WW Blood Bowl League.

(My Children of the Khorne chaos team won the cup two seasons in a row, just sayin’).

And although I didn’t want it to end, it did, and my time at the first-ever Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention was over. Which was actually pretty good because my brain was on autopilot at that point.

Ian: Everyone on both sides of the screen seemed to have a great time, and the only real complaints I heard were that there were too many good things happening at once and people had to make a choice on which stream to watch.

Matthew: While many games had a tendency to overrun, I’d say they each ran to optimal length and didn’t cause too much disruption farther up the schedule.

RichT: Which are all good things to happen, actually, with your first online convention, so we’re going to review all the metrics we can gather ourselves and from the super folks at Gehenna Gaming, and see what we can learn from all that.

Will we do another one? We just don’t know yet, but whether we do or not, this one sure did what we wanted to do – folks who attended had a whole lot of fun! If you missed out and want to watch the games and panels, they are currently on the Onyx Path and Gehenna Gaming Twitch channels for subscribers, but will soon migrate over to the Onyx Path YouTube page for all to watch!

So, from all of us to all of you, whether you attended or didn’t, thanks for making it a real joy to walk with you exploring:

Many Worlds, One Path!

Blurbs!

Kickstarter!

The Legendlore Kickstarter funded right before we started the Virtual Con last week! A really great way to start things off! Now we’re building towards Stretch Goals: the GM’s Screen, and starting the Legendlore Companion book PDF!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/339646881/legendlore-rpg-setting-for-5th-edition-fantasy-roleplaying-0

Grab your friends and escape to another world!

You’ve found an enchanted portal — a transition point — between worlds. The portal, called a Crossing, takes you to a world you thought only existed in novels and films: a magical land where dragons roam the skies, orcs and hobgoblins terrorize weary travelers, and unicorns prance through the forest. It is a world where humans join other peoples such as elves, trolls, dwarves, changelings, and the dreaded creatures who steal the night. It is a world of fantasy — of imagination.

It is the Realm.

It is Legendlore.

Onyx Path Media!

This week: the most exciting episode of the Onyx Pathcast ever, recorded live at the Onyx Path Virtual Gaming Convention!

As always, this Friday’s Onyx Pathcast will be on Podbean or your favorite podcast venue! https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

Hi all!

We’ll be back next week with our usual promotion of all the excellent games on our Twitch and YouTube channels, but for now, we encourage you to do what it seems a lot of people are doing right now, and hop over to our Twitch: twitch.tv/theonyxpath

While the convention has ended, but subscribing to our Twitch channel (which you can do for free if you have Amazon Prime), you get access to all the panels and games that ran on it over the convention weekend. So, if you missed a panel or game you really wanted to watch, head on to our Twitch, subscribe, and browse our back catalogue!

Other than our content, we would like to promote a couple more games for those without Twitch:

Occultists Anonymous continue their excellent Mage: The Awakening game here:

Episode 106: Friends & Minions The cabal combats the uninvited guest summoned by an Exarchal Supernal Being. The danger of the Exarchal attention prompts further investigations away from the Supernal. https://youtu.be/YSErlwnC7Nc

Episode 107: Making Promises Songbird reaches out to the Queen of the Vampires of New York about a divine blessing. Wyrd and Atratus hatch a plan to make a car… https://youtu.be/dueYYUl0FrY

And A Bunch of Gamers have just started up a two-part extravaganza of They Came from Beneath the Sea! right here:

The Crabby Lizard from the Murkey Depths

Episode 1: In the small east coast town of Chatham Massachusetts things are easy. The soda pop shop is ready for any of the locals. The city comes together for a bake sale to help their neighbors, and everyone knows each other. All that changes when a strange electrical storm and a booming voice can be heard over the jukebox. Tonight, the strange, the horrid, the damp creatures from beyond the stars and the depths of the sea rise up to meet the people of Chatham.https://youtu.be/UwxzdwVoYQE

The Tabletop Almanac has released a lovely review of Legendlore that you’ll want to see! https://thetabletopalmanac.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/rpg-reviews-legendlore-manuscript-preview/

Please check these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games! We’d love to feature you!

Electronic Gaming!

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is awesome! (Seriously, you need to roll 100 dice for Exalted? This app has you covered.)

On Amazon and Barnes & Noble!

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue from which you bought it. Reviews really, really help us get folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these latest fiction books:

Our Sales Partners!

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost Second Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scion 2e books and other products are available now at Studio2: https://studio2publishing.com/blogs/new-releases/scion-second-edition-book-one-origin-now-available-at-your-local-retailer-or-online

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e at the same link! And now Scion Origin and Scion Hero and Trinity Continuum Core and Trinity Continuum: Aeon are available to order!

As always, you can find Onyx Path’s titles at DriveThruRPG.com!

On Sale This Week!

Available this Wednesday, we are just a bit embarrassed to say that we’ll be releasing on DTRPG the PDF and PoD versions of Swine and Cheese Party, Et Al., excerpts from The Complete Duke Rollo, for Trinity Continuum: Aberrant!

Also available this Wednesday on DTRPG: the Advance PDF for Quantum Entanglement the Trinity Continuum: Aeon Jumpstart!

Conventions!

Though dates for physical conventions are subject to change due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, here’s what’s left of our current list of upcoming conventions (and really, we’re just waiting for this last one to be cancelled even though it’s Nov/Dec). Instead, keep an eye out here for more virtual conventions we’re going to be involved with:

PAX Unplugged: https://unplugged.paxsite.com/

And now, the new project status updates!

Development Status from Eddy Webb! (Projects in bold have changed status since last week.):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep.)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Adversaries of the Righteous (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Clades Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

The Devoted Companion (Deviant: The Renegades)

Saints and Monsters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Anima

CtL 2e Novella Collection: Hollow Courts (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

M20 Technocracy Operative’s Dossier (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

Redlines

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Hundred Devil’s Night Parade (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Novas Worldwide (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Exalted Essence Edition (Exalted 3rd Edition)

M20 Rich Bastard’s Guide To Magick (Mage: The Ascension 20th Anniversary)

V5 Children of the Blood (was The Faithful Undead) (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

V5 Forbidden Religions (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Wild Hunt (Scion 2nd Edition)

Second Draft

Many-Faced Strangers – Lunars Companion (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Dearly Bleak – Novella (Deviant: The Renegades)

Mission Statements (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Contagion Chronicle Ready-Made Characters (Chronicles of Darkness)

Under Alien Suns (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

V5 Trails of Ash and Bone (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Adventure! core (Trinity Continuum: Adventure!)

Dead Man’s Rust (Scarred Lands)

Development

TC: Aberrant Reference Screen (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Contagion Chronicle: Global Outbreaks (Chronicles of Darkness)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

N!ternational Wrestling Entertainment (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Assassins (Trinity Continuum Core)

Manuscript Approval

Crucible of Legends (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Post-Approval Development

Editing

Lunars Novella (Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Player’s Guide to the Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Contagion Chronicle Jumpstart (Chronicles of Darkness)

TC: Aberrant Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

LARP Rules (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

The Book of Lasting Death (Mummy: The Curse 2e)

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (They Came From!)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Post-Editing Development

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

W20 Shattered Dreams Gift Cards (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Hunter: The Vigil 2e core (Hunter: The Vigil 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Pirates of Pugmire KS-Added Adventure (Realms of Pugmire)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Terra Firma (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Indexing

Art Direction from Mike Chaney!

In Art Direction

Scion Titanomachy – Art coming in.

Tales of Aquatic Terror

WoD Ghost Hunters (KS) – Prepping KS assets.

Aberrant – AD’d. First new comic in.

Hunter: The Vigil 2e

Mummy 2

Deviant – Dividing up among current artists.

Legendlore – KS running.

Technocracy Reloaded (KS)

Cults of the Blood God – Rolling along.

Scion: Dragon (KS) – Waiting on art notes.

Masks of the Mythos (KS) – Some tweaking to art notes and hiring artists.

Scion: Demigod (KS) – Tweaking art notes, hiring artists. Splats in progress.

They Came From Beyond the Grave! (KS) – Finals coming in.

TC: Adventure! (KS) – Cover art finishing.

In Layout

Yugman’s Guide to Ghelspad

Vigil Watch

TC Aeon Terra Firma

V5 Let the Streets Run Red

Pugmire Adventure

Proofing

Trinity Aeon Jumpstart – New artist taking care of finishing missing art.

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate – Finishing Backer PDF errata.

Contagion Chronicle – Going to WW for approval this week.

Cavaliers of Mars: City of the Towered Tombs

Magic Item Decks (Scarred Lands)

Yugman’s Guide Support Decks (Scarred Lands)

Dark Eras 2 Screen and booklet

At Press

Scion Companion – Shutting down errata.

TCFBTS Heroic Land Dwellers – Prepping PoD files.

TCFBTS Screen and Booklet – Files at press.

They Came from Beneath the Sea! – Files at press.

Creature Collection 5e – PoD files uploaded. Traditional files sent to printer.

Pirates of Pugmire – Files at press. Prepping files for PoD.

Pirates of Pugmire Screen – Files at press.

Duke Rollo Aberrant Book: Swine & Cheese Party – PDf and PoD versions on sale Wednesday on DTRPG.

Pugmire Buried Bones – Gathering errata.

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition Dark Eras Compilation – Gathering errata.

Today’s Reason to Celebrate!

Today is feet up and dozing after the busy, busy, Virtual Con and celebrating its success!

[oldmancopper]

Spring 2019 and Fall 2019 Course Evaluations

No real time for fancy graphics - can’t figure out if I ever posted my Spring 2019 evaluations here, so, here’s a compilation of 2019 Evaluations:

Spring 2019

2001 

-Engaging classes, with lots of back and forth. Excellent Professor.

-When I registered for this class I really thought that it was going to be boring because I can't stand lectures, but I was so wrong. Professor Y_______ created lectures that were extremely interesting and had great value to us as game majors as well as teaching us things about how the industry works as a whole. The assignments were always very relevant to the course and I really feel like I've gotten something out of this class. Not only were the lectures interesting, but they were fun and engaging as well. I really enjoyed this class.

3900 

Professor Y_____ gave great info and advice when he taught the class. But unfortunately, his presentations were far and few in between. Instead, he more so looked over and guided the class from the background. I would love to have seen some more lectures.

3175

- I think a smaller class size would benefit all of the students more (although I know that's not up to you).

-Very nice system of having students choose topics they find important

2175 

-Great professor, class can be hard.

-Really enjoyed the class in total.

- This is honestly one of the best classes I have taken at backer. I feel like I have gained the most out of this class than any other class. W___ is awesome.

- Extremely useful course

• Overall, this is one of the best classes I have taken at B_____r thus far. Professor Y_____ is very knowledgeable in the games industry, and very clearly knows what he is talking about. As with anything, there are a couple of things that could be addressed. Although assignments are graded more quickly than most other classes, there is still the occasional assignment or two that are graded a few weeks later, and it is hard to go back that long ago and redo an assignment like that if need be. The quizzes are handled in a way that is particularly stressful. Although they are a true test of what you have learned, expecting people to get low scores and then curving up afterward turns into a waiting game afterward, which sometimes takes several weeks to figure out what your true score actually is. This brings down your overall grade for a few weeks, and provides an unneeded source of stress.

- This course went well! It's a shame that so much of the class-time was lost to Holidays or snow days. But either way the only thing I wish was included, would be more stories of the professor's personal experience. Experience is "the best teacher" as many says, and hearing the stories of someone with lots of industry-related experience would benefit the class greatly in the future.

3901

Live Studio is the reason I'm still at B____r. There is so much value in what W___ and M____ are providing us students. They preach about data-driven design, proper implementation and usage of analytics, and are happy to share their vast array of experiences as well as contacts. However, it is mostly student driven, with us making games 80% of the time during class. But they are always around to provide guidance and steer us in the correct direction. They will allow us to fail, but only so that we grow, and they make sure we understand why we failed. It is an excellent course, and I am endlessly grateful for what I've learned and the opportunities I have been provided with because of it.

W___ Y_____ is the best professor at B____r College. What he teaches goes far beyond the classroom.

-Live was a blast. I'm honestly sad I cant take it next semester.

-Live studio is an amazing interactive class that is meant for students who are serious about working in a professional environment along side other students who have a good work ethic and are willing to push their boundaries to the limit for the benefit of their future and knowledge for themselves and others. Changing the registration of the class to anything but interviews, portfolios, and references would make the quality of live decrease immensely due to the poor work ethic and lack of ability in certain student groups. Keeping the high standards of live will make sure that the work that comes out of the studio will guarantee finished products and great experiences for the working students and their portfolios for when they graduate and need to get a job in their specialized fields.

-This was an amazing class to be a part of. It really felt like I was in an internship. The atmosphere was professional, but laid back too. The professors were incredible to talk and work with. They gave great advice that has helped me connect with other people in the industry. Live is an incredible course and I look forward to working with them again next semester!

3901L

You guys gotta get better with your lectures. They're highly informative, but you guys tend to go off topic and make the lecture 30 min longer than it needs to be. I love listening to you both talk, but it really eats into our studio time sometimes.

Fall 2019

2175

• 10/10 would have rotisserie chicken at 10:30 am again.

• Despite the issues I had with completing assignments (the subject matter wasn't too difficult it was a variety of issues mainly outside of school) I enjoyed this class greatly. W___ is a great teacher arguably my favorite professor that I've had in my time at this school. I've taken a few of his class just because he makes the subject matter interesting and easy to understand.

• Highly Recommend this class to pretty much everyone in my major, as well as other game design majors. The amount of problem solving and crucial information to how to handle the real world is too good to pass up. I don't believe i've ever had a class that i've wanted more of when the final exams start coming up. Highest recommendation for this class to become mandatory to the game design major

• I hope he enjoys our Christmas present

2175

• Have not learned anything in this course. Most of his "lectures" are flooded with irrelevant anecdotes. The quality of his quizzes and tests are terrible because the answers are completely subjective. Unless you remember and catch everything he says in class, it's impossible to get a perfect score on any of his quizzes or tests because you can't find a majority of his information online. There's simply no possible way to study his material. If the tests and quizzes weren't multiple choice, I can confidently say that all of us would have failed.

• I would have liked there to be more homework assignments throughout the course that reinforce the important concepts that were tested during quizzes and exams.

• All assignments and in class conversations were geared towards game students, felt unengaging as someone who doesn't care as much about making games. We should be allowed to pitch nongame ideas for software for the future.

• Professor is great and knows what he is talking about. Would have him again.

• This is a really good course for students to learn some bits and pieces of the management side of thing in the field of game development.

• A very rewarding course experience. Much was learned from this class and it helped shape my future by helping me realize what I want to pursue in my professional career.

• This class was insanely helpful in figuring out what I would like to do with my career. Turns out, being a producer is not my thing but knowing elements of productions will absolutely help me in my career to better work with producers and project managers.

3901

This class consistently pushes me to be my best. M___ and W__push us to be goal driven individuals, there's no random acts of gamedev in this class. It feels less like a class and more of a serious project, we know what needs to be done, we know how divide up tasks, and we know the definition of done. This is the class I'm so glad I got to take, I've grown so much as a person because of it. It's insane how much I've learned from this. The lectures are so important- we learn about the business and marketing side of games, we understand concepts that most students never get to touch. I'm excited for the next version of live, it can only get better!

• Easily one of my favorite classes. I love being able to work on a professional game. I feel like I work best on small teams, so this class is perfect for me. My team was amazing to work with and we got so much done this semester. I really love getting feedback from them and the professors. The professors were especially helpful in giving me tips for working in the industry. They are just fun in general to speak with. Overall, this is one of my best classes.

[effieworldwide]

Winner Spotlight: “Re:scam” by Netsafe & DDB New Zealand

September 26, 2019

2019 APAC Effie Awards 2 Gold - IT/Telco & Brand Experience - Services

Netsafe is an independent, non-profit online safety organisation. It provides online safety support, expertise and education to people in New Zealand. It’s been around for more than 20 years, founded in 1998 to help New Zealand’s internet users stay safe online.

After noticing the growing influence of technology in their respective areas, the New Zealand Police, Ministry of Education and several not-for-profits teamed up with telecommunication organisations and IT industry partners to create an independent body focussed on online safety. Together they created the Internet Safety Group (rebranded Netsafe in 2008).

In 2018, Netsafe wanted to curb the alarming increase in phishing attacks - fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information through hoax or scam emails. Between 2015 and 2018, phishing attacks had grown by 65% worldwide, and just in New Zealand, $257m per year was being lost to cyber crime - and that’s just the reported amount. The shame and humility victims feel after falling prey to an internet scam means most attacks go unreported.

So Netsafe partnered with DDB New Zealand to create the “Re:scam” initiative, a crew of AI chatbots designed to respond directly to scammers’ tactics. Since launch, the bots have saved thousands from falling victim.

“Re:scam” earned 11 Effies – including seven Gold – in the 2018 Effie Awards New Zealand and 2019 APAC Effie Awards competitions, in categories including IT/Telco, Data Driven, Limited Budget, and Experiential.

Below, Rupert Price, Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand, explains how it worked.

Effie: What were your objectives for “Re:scam”?

RP: The objectives for the “Re:scam” campaign were relatively straightforward.

First, make people aware of the dangers of internet phishing scams. It was important to educate New Zealanders on the telltale signs of email scams and also to reassure them that they weren’t alone. By demonstrating that this was a widespread problem, we could show New Zealanders there was no shame or humility in being the target of an email scammer – it happens to all of us. This would be measured by earned media coverage, as we had no budget to buy media exposure.

Second, give internet users a tool to fight back against phishing scams. Not only did we want to reduce the number of people falling prey to such scams, we also wanted to discourage the scammers in the first place. By showing the scammers that people were on to them, although outside of legal jurisdiction, we wanted to show them people were prepared to fight back. This would be measured by the level of direct engagement with the campaign.

Third, make people aware of Netsafe’s role in keeping Kiwis safe from harm online. We wanted New Zealanders to know there was an organization protecting their interests online and to show them that they had somewhere to turn if they had any concerns about online safety. Knowing you are not alone is powerful encouragement when fighting back against cyber crime. This would be measured by visits and enquiries to the Netsafe website.

Effie: What was the strategic insight that drove the campaign? 

RP: Obviously email scammers rely on the art of disguise, exploiting people’s inherent sense of trust through pretending to be someone they’re not. To succeed, this scheme relies on most people to be trusting, which most New Zealanders generally are. 

Our big insight was, of course, that this ‘bond of trust’ has to work both ways. Not only does the email recipient have to believe they are dealing with a credible sender, but the scammer also has to believe they are dealing with a gullable and willing recipient for the scam to work.

This breakthrough insight gave us our big idea. We were going to beat the email scammers at their own game. If they were going to impersonate people with an ‘offer too good to be true’ then we would impersonate a willing and gullible victim to waste their time - without wasting ours.

Effie: What was your big idea? How did you bring the idea to life?

RP: An AI-powered chatbot that imitated human victims, wasting scammers’ time and protecting real people from harm. Re:scam was an AI-based initiative that gave people a tool to fight back against scammers. When someone received a phishing email, they could forward it to me@rescam.org. Our program then picked up the conversation and replied to the scammer based on the email. Replies were designed to lead scammers on for as long as possible with exchanges that wasted limitless hours of their time.

Effie: If scammers were busy talking to a robot, they weren’t talking to real people.

RP: This was a good first step, but at its heart Re:scam was a faceless entity, not built to be shared en masse. Because we had no media budget, if we wanted to give ourselves a chance of breaking into culture and driving mass awareness, we needed to give the bot some personality. Or rather, multiple personalities.

We introduced AI cat-phishing to the world with a deliberate blend of human and computer-generated creativity.

We engaged IBM’s AI ‘Watson’ to help analyse the content of messages and formulate responses, and created a digital video as the centre-piece of our communications. This mirrored the multiple personalities of Re:scam by showing different C.G. faces and voices flickering in and out.

To show that anyone could be a victim of an email scam, Re:scam was created to mimic various types of personalities. With deliberate spelling mistakes and malapropisms, each “character” had their own backstory and unique way of talking.

From the retiree asking “The Illuminati” if they had a bingo night he could join (and who sent his bank details through One. Number. At. A. Time), to the single mother who was excited to win big money, each was programmed to be as frustrating and time-consuming as possible, while remaining human enough to avoid detection. Sometimes our bots would accuse the scammers themselves of being bots.

Every time they got a response, they now had to second guess themselves.

Effie: How did you measure the effectiveness of the effort? Were there any surprises in the results?

RP: Being a campaign designed to directly encourage consumer interaction (for the campaign to work, it required people to do something), primary measurement was relatively simple. The campaign would succeed or fail based on the number of people who forwarded on their phishing emails and let the Re:scam AI bots to do their thing. 

The thing that surprised us most was the sheer volume of responses we received. 210,000 scam emails were forwarded onto us over the campaign period. Most of these were from New Zealand but many were from overseas also. The big learning for us was that an entirely earned and owned channel campaign in today’s media landscape is a truly global campaign, if the idea is strong enough.

The secondary measurement of the campaign, the objective of which was to raise awareness of the issue, showed the earned media coverage for the campaign was everwhere. Through New Zealand news media outlets Re:scam reached an audience of 4m+ across all networks, (that’s nearly the entire population of NZ, by the way). However, the campaign’s global reach was in excess of $300m+ through media outlets as diverse as The BBC, The Guardian, El Pais and CNN.

Effie: What was the greatest challenge you faced when creating this campaign, and how did you approach that challenge?

RP: The greatest challenge we faced with the Re:scam campaign is that we had no media budget. As Netsafe is a non-profit NGO, its primary channel of communication is though the news media. It relies on the ‘newsworthiness’ of the issues to get picked up in the news media and carried to the audience.

Of course, this is a high-risk strategy. There was no guarantee the news media would be intrigued by our initiative, and depending on the news cycle of the day, other stories might take precedent. The news media creates interest, which is then amplified on social media. Since pickup from news channels is vital, we must always push ourselves to come up with ideas that create interest beyond the issue itself. In the case of Re:scam, we knew internet scamming and phishing tactics was a topic of public interest, but we also knew that our unique and innovative AI bot solution would be of equivalent news interest.

Of course, we also had to build the AI Bot, which was no mean feat itself!

Effie: What lessons can marketers take away from your work?

RP:

Don’t be afraid to try something that has never been done - someone has to be first, so why not you?

If it doesn’t exist, be prepared to build it yourself.

Don’t let a lack of a budget hold you back - great ideas will always prevail if there’s enough will and conviction behind them.

Make sure your campaign or initiative ‘adds value’ to your audience in some way. If it’s not through utility or enlightenment, at the very least entertain them along the way.

***

Rupert Price is the Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand/Interbrand New Zealand.

Rupert’s career in advertising spans nearly eighteen years in London’s most pre-eminent agencies and now nearly eight years in New Zealand. In the UK, Rupert worked on brand and advertising strategy with Y&R, AMV BBDO, JWT, Saatchi&Saatchi and Ogilvy. 

Beginning with local projects for companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, The Army and Sainsbury’s, Rupert broadened his skill set to take on global strategic roles for BP, SAB Miller, Unilever and American Express amongst others. In 2010, Rupert relocated with his young family to New Zealand. 

Now working with DDB and Interbrand, Rupert has delivered strategic projects for Westpac, Lion, The Warehouse, Lotto NZ and now Vodafone. Rupert has won numerous IPA Effectiveness Awards, Effies and APG Awards and has been involved in highly awarded advertising campaigns including Persil ‘Dirt is Good’ and Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty.’

Awards earned by “Re:scam”:

2019 APAC Effie Awards: GOLD – IT/Telco GOLD – Brand Experience - Services SILVER – Data Driven

2018 Effie Awards New Zealand: GOLD – Limited Budget GOLD – Most Effective Use of Digital Technology GOLD – Most Effective PR/Experiential Campaign GOLD – Best Strategic Thinking GOLD – Most Progressive Campaign SILVER – New Product or Service SILVER – Short Term Success BRONZE – Social Marketing/Public Service

Read more Winner Spotlight interviews >

2018 Effie Awards New Zealand judge Mark Earls shares his thoughts on “Re:scam”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT NOTE

They'd merely seem like incompetent adults. To say nothing of idiotic.1 So if such a company has two possible strategies, a conservative one that's slightly more likely to find them using Perl and Linux. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum. Investors always say what they really care about is the team. So my theory about what's going on? What do they need in order to decide?

Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.2 For example, if a reputable investor is willing to invest on a convertible note, using standard paperwork, that is either uncapped or capped at a good valuation, you can, because they grow into the trees of the economy. And when you convince them, use the same matter-of-the-pants underfunded garage startup.3 If you can attract the best hackers to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a Java project. So if you need to win. Prices are so much higher now that if you take a vote, all you're measuring is the error. The result is bronze, which is what the situation deserved. When I think about the upper limit on what you should raise, a good rule of thumb is not to make fundraising too complicated, but if feeling you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery. They try to convince with their pitch.

When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to keep working on the product, has been the company's main focus for 44% of its existence. Any investor who spent significant time deciding probably came close to saying yes. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident and respected by the VCs. For example, we were looking one day at a slide of some great fifteenth century painting, and one of the things I find missing when I look at the world in the same conversation. Another view is that a real essay you're writing for yourself. I can predict quite well what sort of people will change the way they think about programs. Back in 1995, the e-commerce business, we'd have found the idea terrifying. I also knew some made a lot of air in the straw.

My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it, they'll let you run the company. Our competitors had cgi scripts. Treat investors as saying no. Lexical closures provide a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb is to multiply the number of officially approved writers were allowed to write essays at all. At Y Combinator we still only have four people, so only three or four people, so only three or four people, so we had to think of yourself as being already successful, and lose your taste for the schleps you need to figure it out.4 Most adults make some effort to conceal their flaws, and at the same time insist on high standards of behavior for kids, a lot of things practically all humans have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want random people pestering them with business plans. There's an initial phase of negotiation about the big questions. Data moves like smells now. In fact, if you think in Lisp. If instead of seeming evasive and ashamed about having been turned down and thereby implicitly agreeing with the verdict you talk candidly about what scared investors about you, you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying yes, and you have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast. The serious hacker will also want to learn C, in order to hack Unix, and Perl for system administration and cgi scripts.5 Foreseeing disaster, my friend and his wife rapidly improvised: yes, the turkey had wanted to die.

But in general, but at least they probably really do want whatever they're asking for. The ultimate source of the forces acting on investors. Over the years, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb is to multiply the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a Formula 1 racecar. But after a while I learned the trick of speaking fast. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. In Common Lisp I tried to figure out what lies you were told as a kid, I used to think all VCs were the same. I do it on that computer, you'll find a group powerful enough to support one. A greedy algorithm takes the best of the options in front of it right now. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be to write a prototype that solves a subset of resourcefulness.6 How can we find these too? They're like a character in a movie that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to happen to, but there's usually some feeling they shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion.

And it's likely to.7 At home, hackers don't work in noisy, open spaces; they work in long binges during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into programming instead of writing specs first, and that will convince any investor. Sometimes they're more candid and say explicitly that they need to get good grades to impress employers, within which the employees waste most of their momentum. Whereas if you're talking to a VC, and he'll chase down the money. So if you want to raise a $5 million series A round, unless you're in a panic because your servers are on fire, but the time to hypothesize that it was written primarily in a programming language called Lisp. But I think the problem with many, as with people in their early twenties generally, is that the function of office space is to express rank. Perl wins because it has large libraries for manipulating strings.8 Ordinarily technology changes fast. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in—the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. It seemed the planet was being irretrievably ruined. It's not uncommon for investors and acquirers to get buyer's remorse.9

Notes

I'm not dissing these people never come face to face with the definition of property. I said yes.

I don't like the outdoors? Earlier versions used a TV for a sufficiently identifiable style, you could get all the red counties. But that oversimplifies his role. Html.

The best one could reasonably be with children, with smiles and laughter. In fact, this idea is not one of the present day equivalent of the Facebook/Twitter route and building something for which you want as an animation with multiple frames. But the change is a bit.

You have to choose between great people. One new thing the company is common, to take over the details. But people like numbers.

I'm skeptical whether economic inequality to turn into them. A great programmer might invent things an ordinary adult slave seems to have to think of. This seems to be tweaking stuff till it's yanked out of just Japanese.

If you have to spend all your time working on such an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you. A variant is that if you pack investor meetings too closely, you'll find that with a no-land, while Reddit is Delicious/popular is driven by people trying to figure out yet whether you'll succeed. I'd say the rate of change in the postwar period also helped preserve the wartime compression of wages—specifically increased demand for them.

Note to nerds: or possibly a winner, they don't yet get what they're wasting their time on schleps, but there are no false negatives. It's possible that companies will naturally wonder, how little autonomy one would have been five years ago. It's surprising how small a problem if you'll never need to get you a couple years. Which is not whether it's good, but this sort of person who understands how to do.

You can build things for programmers, but only if the potential magnitude of the venture business. If Congress passes the founder of the lies we tell kids are smarter than preppies, just those you can do to get a real reason out of customers you need to go wrong seems to have had to write and deals longer to write in a domain is for sale.

One YC founder told me that if you want to either. The biggest counterexample here is one of the problem, but as a cause them to switch to OSX. It's hard to judge for yourself and that modern corporate executives were, like languages and safe combinations, and as we use the word has shifted.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, the friends I promised anonymity to, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, and Geoff Ralston for sparking my interest in this topic.

[coinprojects]

New Post has been published on https://coinprojects.net/who-what-and-how-to-regulate-in-a-borderless-code-governed-world/

Who, what and how to regulate in a borderless, code-governed world?

Hold onto your hats, boys and girls! It’s a new world — a financial system without intermediaries, that anyone can access 24 hours a day with only a mobile phone and a wallet! As Julien Bouteloup said to me: 

“In DeFi, what we are building is fully decentralised technology, fully transparent, run by mathematics. No one can beat that.”

He continued: “We are building on research papers, 40 years of research, fundamental research, discrete mathematics being built and put on-chain that no one can beat. You cannot beat that. GitHub didn’t exist in the ‘90s. First, the fact that we’re going at the speed of light, is because everything is open source, and everyone can participate.”

Related: DeFi literacy: Universities embrace decentralized finance education

A Novum Insights report stated back in August that since 2020, the DeFi market has grown by a factor 40, with the total value locked in DeFi at around $61 billion at the time (while the current TVL stands at around $165 billion). Stablecoins’ capitalization, an important part of DeFi, grew in the first half of 2021 to $112 billion.

Massive gains are being made but, at the same time, DeFi investors are also losing money because DeFi is not regulated, moderated, intermediated, hosted or validated by a central authority, only driven by smart contracts. So if a smart contract fails or is attacked, consumers have no remedy. Loretta Joseph, global digital asset regulatory expert, said to me: “Regulators protect consumers and investors. In DeFi, you don’t have any intermediaries to regulate, so it’s totally P2P. The question is how it will be regulated in the future. People are going to get scammed. When people start to get scammed, the first thing they do is complain to the regulator.”

Related: Will regulation adapt to crypto, or crypto to regulation? Experts answer

Indeed, since 2019, DeFi protocols have lost about $285 million to hacks and other exploit attacks. And as the experts stated, the majority of hacks were due to developer incompetence and coding mistakes. That’s significant when the sector is entirely reliant on the code.

Related: The radical need for updating blockchain security protocols

The challenges of regulation

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Hester Peirce said in an interview with Forkast.News about DeFi back in February: “It’s going to be challenging to us because most of the way we regulate is through intermediaries, and when you really build something that’s decentralized, there’s no intermediary. It’s great for resilience of a system. But it’s much harder for us when we’re trying to go in and regulate to figure out how to do that.”

Regulatory concerns tend to be around the volatility of crypto markets as contrasted with government-backed fiat currency, the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing, the unregulated nature of the market, and the absence of recourse for financial losses. Nonfungible tokens are exploding, generating excitement, confusion, legal questions and massive gains. NFT markets are also attracting large crypto transactions, which will likely bother regulators, who may see the big money moves in NFTs as money laundering. At a macro level, the decentralization of the financial system and the ability to manage economic stability and protect consumer interests poses a further challenge to regulators.

Related: Nonfungible tokens from a legal perspective

DeFi decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are popular as a means of transferring cryptocurrencies across different blockchains. This supports crypto lending and yield farming. DAOs, by conservative estimates, oversee more than $543 million. In a DAO, information technology governance and corporate governance are one and the same. The organization is governed and operated by smart contracts, which are monitored and enforced by algorithms. The code both governs and executes. Should the algorithms fail, who then is responsible?

In a joint article, dubbed “Regulating Blockchain, DLT and Smart Contracts: a technology regulator’s perspective,” a group of researchers outline some key points to consider: (1) the importance of identifying central points which can be used to apply regulation to, such as miners, core software developers, end users. They even raise the potential for governmental or regulatory players to be potential participants; (2) issues of identifying liability — could core software developers be held to account?; (3) the challenges with the immutability and lack of update-ability of smart contracts; and (4) the need for quality assurance and technology audit processes.

It is expected that exchanges and wallet providers will be a focus for regulators. Decentralized exchanges allow users to trade directly from their wallets in a P2P manner without intermediaries. Global money-laundering watchdog the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has exchanges in their sights. Christopher Harding, the chief compliance officer of Civic, noted that the FATF proposed guidelines which suggest that DApps will need to comply with country-specific laws enforcing FATF, AML, and Counter-Terrorism Financing requirements.

Related: FATF draft guidance targets DeFi with compliance

A recent review of 16 leading exchange platforms by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that just four were subject to a significant level of regulation related to trading, so there is a clear gap. Getting listed on any major exchange now requires a project to have passed auditing, but meaningful security doesn’t end there. Toby Lewis, CEO of Novum Insights, made the point:

“Also, remember that smart contracts can be attacked. Even if they are audited, it does not give you a guarantee that it will be exploit-free. Do your own research before you start.”

In an open-source environment where projects are developing at an average compound growth rate of 20% per year, finding just the right moment to regulate, wherein people are protected from risk but innovation is not constrained, is a classic problem to solve. Some governments have addressed achieving this balance by using regulatory sandboxes (U.K., Bermuda, India, South Korea, Mauritius, Australia, Papua New Guinea and Singapore), while some have gone straight to legislating (San Marino, Bermuda, Malta, Liechtenstein).

Far from resisting regulation, leading DeFi figures embrace it as part of the maturing of the industry. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Stani Kulechov, the founder of DeFi lending platform Aave, suggests that peer review will be the future: “Auditors are not here to guarantee the security of a protocol, merely they help to spot something that the team itself wasn’t aware of. Eventually it’s about peer review and we need to find as a community incentives to empower more security experts into the space.” In the same article, Emeliano Bonassi spoke about ReviewsDAO, a peer review forum for connecting security experts with projects looking for reviews. Bonassi sees potential for this to become a learning opportunity where people with specialized knowledge can contribute to improving the security of the ecosystem.

Tan Tran, CEO of Vemanti Group, suggested: “Going forward, I do see accelerated adoption of platforms with permissionless financial products and services that can be used by anyone anywhere, but each will be governed by a regulated-party with centralized control to ensure accountability and compliance. This is not about stopping innovation. It’s more about deterring bad actors from exploiting unsophisticated consumers.” Giving an expert opinion on DeFi to Cointelegraph, Brendan Blumer, CEO of Block.one, concluded: “The real winners in the digital economy will be those that think long-term and take the time to ensure their products meet jurisdictional and professional service requirements.”

It certainly looks like exchanges and software developers could be in the sights of regulators. We anticipate regulators will look for ways to improve technology quality assurance processes and DeFi governance, which can only be done in conjunction with the industry. Mark Taylor emphasized that regulators need to continue to work in partnership with crypto industry players to protect consumers.

Julien Bouteluop explained: “We are actually building, in DeFi, everything that traditional finance has, but faster, stronger, more transparent and accessible by everyone that’s here. It’s really different. It means that anyone in the world can access technology and doesn’t need to ask permission from anyone. I think it’s necessary to push for innovation, and to build a better world.”

Who, what and how do we regulate in this global 24/7, borderless market? This is a whole new ball game. Regulators and industry will need to work hand in hand.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Jane Thomason is a thought leader on blockchain for social impact. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Queensland. She has had multiple roles with the British Blockchain & Frontier Technologies Association, the Kerala Blockchain Academy, the Africa Blockchain Center, the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, Frontiers in Blockchain, and Fintech Diversity Radar. She has written multiple books and articles on Blockchain. She has been featured in Crypto Curry Club’s Top 100 Women in Crypto, the Decade of Women Collaboratory’s Top 10 Digital Frontier Women, Lattice’s Top 100 Fintech Influencers for SDGs, and Thinkers360’s Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Blockchain.

Source link By Cointelegraph By Jane Thomason

#Altcoin #Bitcoin #BlockChain #BlockchainNews #Crypto

[un-enfant-immature]

Google signs up Verizon for its AI-powered contact center services

Google today announced that it has signed up Verizon as the newest customer of its Google Cloud Contact Center AI service, which aims to bring natural language recognition to the often inscrutable phone menus that many companies still use today (disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of the Verizon Media Group). For Google, that’s a major win, but it’s also a chance for the Google Cloud team to highlight some of the work it has done in this area. It’s also worth noting that the Contact Center AI product is a good example of Google Cloud’s strategy of packaging up many of its disparate technologies into products that solve specific problems.

“A big part of our approach is that machine learning has enormous power but it’s hard for people,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Instead of telling people, ‘well, ‘here’s our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text — and why don’t you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?’ Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it’s much easier for them when we do that and […] that it’s a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers.”

The company first announced Contact Center AI at its Cloud Next conference two years ago and it became generally available last November. The promise here is that it will allow businesses to build smarter contact center solutions that rely on speech recognition to provide customers with personalized support while it also allows human agents to focus on more complex issues. A lot of this is driven by Google Cloud’s Dialogflow tool for building conversational experiences across multiple channels.

“Our view is that AI technology has reached a stage of maturity where it can be meaningfully applied to solving business problems that customers face,” he said. “One of the most important things that companies need is to differentiate the customer experience through helpful and convenient service — and it has never been more important, especially during the period we’re all in.”

Not too long ago, bots — and especially text-based bots — went through the trough of disillusionment, but Kurian argues that we’ve reached a very different stage now and that these tools can now provide real business value. What’s different now is that a tool like Contact Center AI has more advanced natural language processing capabilities and is able to handle multiple questions at the same time and maintain the context of the conversation.

“The first generation of something called chatbots — they kind of did something but they didn’t really do much because they thought that all questions can be answered with one sentence and that human beings don’t have a conversation,” he noted and also added that Google’s tools are able to automatically create dialogs using a company’s existing database of voice calls and chats that have happened in the past.

When necessary, the Contact Center AI can automatically hand the call off to a human agent when it isn’t able to solve a problem but another interesting feature is its ability to essentially shadow the human agent and automatically provide real-time assistance.

“We have a capability called Agent Assist, where the technology is assisting the agent and that’s the central premise that we built — not to replace the agent but assist the agent.”

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, more companies are now accelerating their digital transformation projects. Kurian said that this is also true for companies that want to modernize their contact centers, given that for many businesses, this has now become their main way to interact with their customers.

As for Verizon, Kurian noted that this was a very large project that has to handle very high call volumes and a large variety of incoming questions.

“We have worked with Verizon for many, many years in different contexts as Alphabet and so we’ve known the customer for a long time,” said Kurian. “They have started using our cloud. They also experimented with other technologies and so we sort of went in three phases. Phase One is to get a discussion with the customer around the use of our technology for chat, then the focus is on saying you shouldn’t just do chat, you should do chat and voice on a common platform to avoid the kind of thing where you get one response online and a different response when you call. And then we’ve had our engineers working with them — virtually obviously, not physically.”

He noted that Google has seen quite a bit of success with Contact Center AI in the telco space, but also among government agencies, for example, especially in Europe and Asia. In some verticals like retail, he noted, Google Cloud’s customers are mostly focused on chat, while the company is seeing more voice usage among banks, for example. In the telco business, Google sees both across its customers, so it probably made sense for Verizon to bet on both voice and chat with its implementation.

“Verizon’s commitment to innovation extends to all aspects of the customer experience,” said Verizon global CIO and SVP Shankar Arumugavelu in today’s announcement. “These customer service enhancements, powered by the Verizon collaboration with Google Cloud, offer a faster and more personalized digital experience for our customers while empowering our customer support agents to provide a higher level of service.”

[realtalk-princeton]

Don't know whether to major in ORFE, COS, or ECON. I really love the financial sector in NYC and always wanted to work as an analyst in nyc for a group like goldman or jane street. Do you guys have any suggestions? I'm looking to major in something that will prepare me with the skills needed for finance jobs.

Response from Sulpicia:

Literally dozens of graduates from each of those majors go to jobs like the one you want every year, and so I wouldn’t consider one necessarily “better” than the others. I think that the most important thing is taking coursework across all three departments (plus other relevant departments) that will give you the skills you need, rather than just picking a major. Have you looked at the Finance certificate yet? That might interest you.

Since you can basically go into finance with any major and there’s a lot of crossover between the ones you picked (e.g. it’s totally doable to be an Econ major and get a COS certificate), I would consider which discipline/department you would feel the most comfortable spending two years with. Do you want to be AB or BSE? AB will likely provide more flexibility, but if you have a lot of AP credit BSE might let you take more classes in your area of interest and fewer in random distribution areas. Do you have friends in any department? Ask them what their classes and independent work are like. What sort of academic work do you imagine yourself doing? Ultimately, you major doesn’t matter THAT much because of the flexibility of Princeton coursework, so pick the place where you feel like you will be happiest and most engaged.

Response from Sushi:

Sulpicia ninja’d me but I hadwritten all of this already so I will add it here.

Iwill defer to Pichu, Edamame, Maybach, Harvey, or other contributors if theyhave different opinions on this question since they have more experience in thefield. They are free to delete my answer if they think it’s wrong/insufficient,but I wanted to provide some input from a not-completely-finance perspectivesince you asked about COS as well. I am speaking from the position ofinterviewing at companies such as Goldman/similar companies, as well asinterviewing at trading companies such as Jane Street/similar companies. I alsodid a Princeternship and another program at Jane Street, and lastly, I haveworked at a similar company in the past.

First,I think that you have to define which jobs you are interested in within the“financial sector.” There are hundreds of different kinds of niche jobs infinance. Investment banking is very different than private equity, working fora venture fund, etc. Since you asked about Goldman and Jane Streetspecifically, I will speak to my knowledge of those.

Ananalyst at places like Goldman is very different from being an analyst atplaces like Jane Street. This is evident even from the interviews. I have foundthat Goldman/similar interview is very focused on financial knowledge(terminology from ECO 362 but information from beyond ECO 362). If you applyfor a quant position at Goldman/similar, you will also have to demonstratebasic coding skills (my friends passed the bar with just COS 126). But you doNOT need COS at all for a job at Goldman/similar. You may have to do some extraself-studying because the knowledge gained by the finance certificate is notenough, but it’s mostly just qualitative econ knowledge that you have to know.

Onthe other hand, a Jane Street recruiter told me that they don’t look atpeople’s resumes unless they’ve already taken probability theory (ORF 309 here)for trading positions or functional programming (COS 326 here, they also lookfor algorithms COS 226) for software engineering positions (or have done theequivalent and have sufficient evidence to prove that, such as high level mathcompetitions for trading and a coursera/etc. course and sufficient sideprojects for software engineering). Also, at one of the companies similar toJane Street, a recruiter told me that they don’t even care whether you have anyfinancial background, they just want you to have the problem-solving ability,modeling/statistical analysis ability, and coding ability to take on a positionthere, and they will teach you all the finance when you join.

AlsoI think another consideration in choosing a company that you will ultimatelyend up in is the work-life balance. The lifestyles at these companies are alsovery different: I’ll give two different examples here since both Goldman andJane Street are near the middle of the spectrum of no work-life balance towork-life balance. I’ve heard that at BAML interns work 120+ hours a week,whereas at some more tech-focused trading companies like Citadel, there’s morework-life balance and it’s the very typical 40 hours a week workweek.

Sothe first step is realizing that you probably will need a different skillset tosucceed in acquiring a job at either of these companies. The people I know whointerned at Jane Street are COS or Math majors. The majority of people I knowwho interned at Goldman are COS, ORF, and ECO, though I do know plenty ofhumanities majors there too. Goldman also has a variety of positions. Theirtypical summer analyst position compared to more engineering type quantpositions (though if you want to do quant I would suggest not doing it at an IBplace, since you would probably have a better experience).

Second,however, you can get a job in finance regardless of what you major in, as longas you pass the resume screen and interviews, and you have the requisite skillsneeded for the position. As I said before, I know plenty of non-econ humanitiesmajors who get jobs at Goldman. If you want to work at Jane Street, any of themore mathematically-oriented majors would work, as long as you take therequired ORF/ECO/MAT classes to be considered. I believe Maybach has written atlength about this, and you can view it through the search bar, but it does noteven matter if you are math track or frat track econ to get these jobs. As longas you can pass the interview (there are plenty of resources online about this,also check Glassdoor for specific questions for specific companies), you willbe fine. Just choose a major where you can make sure that your GPA is above 3.5(3.6 preferred, higher for more selective companies like Jane Street) so thatyou pass the resume screen cutoff.

Also,I would like to add that if you are 100% sure you are going into industry, youdo not need to consider independent work strongly in your major choice. This isbecause you will spend more time prepping for interviews/interviewing in thefall/recruiting for interviews in the spring than doing your independent work(and most of the people I know who wanted to go into industry were 1) bse sothey didn’t have to write a thesis or 2) just wrote bs independent work so theycould graduate).

Hereare some courses that serve as baseline knowledge for the interviews for thesecompanies:

Goldman/similarANALYST: ECO 362 plus lots of self-study, no cos necessary

Goldman/similarQUANT: ECO 362 plus self-study, COS 126/226

JaneStreet/similar QUANT: COS 126/226, ORF 245/309/524/526, no econ necessary

JaneStreet/similar SOFTWARE: COS 126/226/326, no econ necessary

Response from Pichu:

^yeah sushi’s right for the most part and also why would i delete your answer you wrote so much lol. to OP: i would add ORF 335 to the list of courses for more quantitative roles. it’s the same as ECO 362 except you learn the derivations behind everything and actually understand what everything means.

goldman and jane street are pretty different types of companies, in regards to the types of roles available and culture. it seems like you just threw those 2 names out there because you heard people make a lot of money there. so from that it seems like youre not very intellectually driven, in which case the less quantitative and technical roles are probably more for you. so like investment banking or sales & trading at a bank, but basically everyone wants to do that so you should be prepared for some pretty intense competition (and long hours).

In the off-chance that you actually are intellectually curious and are actually interested in things like applied math (which is the same as ORFE) or math, then yeah like sushi said just get good at probability and apply to prop trading places like jane street or optiver. some will expect you to know some finance, some won’t care. if you put anything finance-related on your resume like a class you took, then be prepared to be asked about it. but yeah the culture there is a lot different than at banks, most people at prop trading firms are math/cs people, kinda nerdy, casual dress code that kinda thing.

but truth be told, no job will be super quantitative, even ones with the word “quant” in the name. if you’re actually interested in real quant work, a masters/phd is the way to go. this comes from multiple sources who are pretty experienced in the “financial sector in NYC” as you like to call it

[anklenephew1-blog]

My Week, Part One

Sunday

I did some gardening, digging up a few rows to plant green beans from seed. I started my garden earlier this year, a reaction to last season’s late start, so tomatoes, peppers, and squash are already in the ground, lettuce and onions flourishing in the raised bed. Saturday night, I spotted a spectacularly huge artichoke in my five foot tall perennial that my housemate brother prepared for our enjoyment–from garden to plate in 45 minutes. Really, the only flaw was we had no eggs so I couldn’t whip up a Hollandaise. Still, it was sublime, and had inspired me to keep up the garden labor.

After that, I went to work, getting there at about 2:30. Grades were due the next day, and I was going to be out of the office for the calculus textbook selection committee. My classes only go up to pre-calc, but two of our calculus teachers were preparing their students for the AP test and besides, they hated committee meetings. The non-AP calculus teacher, Wing, was in China, leaving only Hank, the department chair, and me as upper-math options. Hank teaches Stats, and Monday was my birthday, so I thought it’d be nice to sleep in a bit and get out early without guilt. Plus, I like textbook selection committees–a bunch of free textbooks. And one of these days I want to teach non-AP calculus.

I was at school until 11:00 pm. First, I had to finish grading the Algebra 2 tests. Then I had to enter all those tests and the trig class’s tests and review grades. After submitting the final results, I had to prepare for the sub, which was irritating because most subs are a waste of time. I’ve found one sub who is better at math than I am, which is amazing, and one sub who’s an experienced teacher and at least gets kids working, which is a great second best. But neither was available on short notice, so I’d get an incompetent who’d sit on her phone all day, which sucks. But I was getting free textbooks.

Then I had to put flyers around campus, which I’ve never done before. A month earlier, I had seen an email from a district coach about middle school robotics and had emailed him, asking for information about Arduino or robotics activities for high school. As co-director of our school’s chapter for a well-known technology competition, I had discovered how many kids were interested in programming and robotics and was determined to start a club on either or both next year, independent of the competition. The district coach had forwarded my mail to a city government guy who had a grant to encourage community science projects, and was hooked up with a huge project to use technology to collect data about our local environment. (I can’t be specific here.) Next thing I knew, I was given $2000 for a six week project ($600 for me, $600 for another teacher, $800 for expenses!)  that would kickoff with a demo of the technology for interest students. Highly educated people from prestigious universities would be coming from out of town to give the demonstration. I told them that I was completely on board but couldn’t guarantee two things: first, that we could complete any technology project in six weeks towards the end of school and second, my biggest fear, that anyone would show up for the demonstration. I told them that I was pretty sure that I could get two or three kids, but even that was just a hope.

They reassured me: no problem, if no one came, they’d show me and we’d map out next steps. So I’d talked it up in classes, and in the after school club, and now I was putting out flyers, but inside I felt like an 8 year old terrified that no one would show up at Chuck E. Cheese for my birthday party.

I got home at 11:30.

Monday

My birthday. I woke up feeling slightly stiff from the garden labor, which was odd. Mattocking, which is basically a stand-up sit-up, can wreck a back without proper support, but all I’d done was turn over soil with a shovel, which shouldn’t have done any damage.

The calculus committee was much more interesting and relevant than I thought it would be, renewing my determination add calculus to my preps. First step, though, was much more pre-calculus than I’m currently teaching, which for reasons I’ve mentioned will be difficult.  I got six textbooks.

I had a doctor’s appointment with my allergist, who yelled at me for not starting my allergy and asthma regime in February, leaving it to March which allowed the congestion and breathing problems to take hold. I agreed, but pointed out that her regime had me in much better shape than I’d been in years past–save for last year, when I followed it from February on and never had an attack. Seriously, I don’t say this much, but this doctor actually helped me with a real health problem. Usually they misdiagnose me or tell me I’m perfectly healthy despite routine 20 second bouts of deep, unproductive coughing and the wheeze of a lifelong smoker.

For dinner, my mother and stepdad took me out to a Brazilian steakhouse.

Then I went home and found my password for H&R Block.  They bought the prior company I used, although I can’t remember what that was. It’s like with banks: stay with any bank long enough and you’re a Bank of America customer.

When I grade, I do the key and group the tests one day, maybe grade a couple. Then I come back later to do the rest. Similarly, with taxes, I always take one day to get all the forms in order, the login found, get started until I run into a roadblock and quit. Then I come back certain all the small stuff is handled. So Monday evening, I found all the tax forms dumped in my mail crate, logged in, started putting in information. H&R Blocked seemed to think I owed $4,213, which was unnerving. But then I couldn’t find my investment INT-99 forms or my rental property year-end report, so I shot off some emails and went to bed.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning my back seemed fine, much less stiff. The substitute’s note said that all my kids ignored her and had been on their phones all day. One girl left without permission and came back an hour later.  I yelled at the kids, banned phones entirely in every class with some pre-emptive removals just to reinforce the ruling, told everyone they’d have a test or quiz on Wednesday.  The  pre-calc test wasn’t even started, of course, but righteous wrath must out.

Our school has instituted an interesting innovation for advisory. Instead of 30 minutes with one of our regular classes, teachers create lessons on any subject they like, and the students sign up. This is a wrap-around of RTI–basically, what do we do with the kids who aren’t in intervention?–and is thus far pretty successful, two weeks in.

Today I was offering “ESL Word Games” for the first time. I put the kids in teams and play a variant of “Wheel of Fortune”. Surprisingly, some native English speakers were enrolled; apparently, our study halls were overloaded. So I assigned two of them as team advisors and one of them helped me come up with clues.

The session was a huge success. the advisors took their jobs seriously and had a great time giving hints and suggestions. The kid working with me thought up “WATCH READY PLAYER ONE” with the clue “something you do in your free time”. The kids figured out the movie name fairly quickly, but were driven to distraction by “watch”, which stumped even the native speakers. Great lesson, great learning experience, the ESL speakers had a ball, and the native speakers said they wanted to come back.

I stayed at work until 9:00. But there was a bright spot.

Was dispiritedly considering the three tests I have to build (and create multiple versions of), the two tax forms that were password protected for me to figure out and then my taxes to do before midnight.

I won't say there is a God, because I still have the tests. https://t.co/WWGR50RaiB

— EdReal (@Ed_Realist) April 18, 2018

Got home and mostly finished my taxes. That $4,213 tax shortfall held all the way through to itemized deductions, which was confusing the hell out of me because all of my passive rental losses were rejected. Then the web application informed me that, since I’d reported $10,551,000, I would need $791,325 in medical bills before I could start to deduct qualified expenses. That’s when I realized that the $4,213 I thought I owed had a comma after it and was in fact four plus million dollars.

Note to H&R Block: If a teacher reports an eight-figure income, suggest they entered a comma instead of a period.

Result: $1056 refund. Yay.

Wednesday

It took me five minutes just to get out of bed. Why did it take my back three days to react to a bit of digging?

Easy day, generally, with three tests. Which was good, because while standing and walking was manageable, and sitting was pretty easy, moving from standing to sitting or vice versa took two or three tries and caused considerable agony.

The next two days would be busy. Thursday was the technology demonstration that had so much potential if kids would just show up. Friday was the second  half our our technology club competition. While the other contests had been held a couple weeks earlier, the Arduino project showdown had been delayed and moved from a Saturday to a Friday, due to the limited number of entries–just seven.  Three of those entries were from our school. That is, we had three groups of two to four students who had been working on Arduino projects since November, all of them learning to code for the first time, developing prototypes, writing project reports.  We’d done well in the other competitions, taking a first and two thirds. We had high hopes for the Arduino kids.   On Friday, Bart, my partner in crime in the technology club, and I were taking these nine students to a town I hadn’t even heard of, 90 minutes away if there’s no traffic, but there’s always traffic.  The organization would pay for us to rent a van. Our principal would pay for us to miss fourth block.  I would drive, because Bart considers time spent behind a steering wheel a usually unnecessary evil.

With all that on deck and a screaming back, I vowed to leave early and actually got out at four, after printing an algebra 2 handout I’d need. On my way out I ran into Will, a senior and a talented writer who wrote great stories for our school paper. I invited him to the kickoff tomorrow, saying whether he was interested in technology or not he could run the blog showcasing our progress, as a significant goal of this six week pilot was showing other schools how to get started. His involvement in this high-profile project would definitely be useful when applying for internships. He promised to think about it.

Went home, finished filing my taxes, and went to bed early.

Thursday

At nine in the morning Bart, my partner in crime, texted me in a panic, telling me that the director of the technology competition had assumed we weren’t attending the Friday competition. Why? Well, no good reason, really. The real crux of the matter was that the students were two weeks overdue on submitting their project reports. Why? Well, because the date wasn’t on the competition sheet, and the director had only sent out one note with the due date, as an afterthought on another email and we’d missed it. But our students were registered, right? Well, no, they weren’t because the student database was constantly out of date and Bart had kept asking for a clean copy and also, frankly, because Bart is terrible at deadlines. And no, I’m not blaming Bart because I’m terrible at deadlines which is why I gave the job to Bart, along with two-thirds of the stipend.

Before you’re too hard on us, keep in mind that this organization had changed the dates of both competitions, including putting one date right at the end of spring break, which made for brutal logistics and lost us several competitors whose parents belatedly realized that their kids would be out of town that day. Also keep in mind that the director understands we’re teachers, with other actual jobs, and is extremely nice on due dates.

I now had something much bigger to worry about than whether anyone would come to my birthday party.

So I’ll stop there, since this is pretty long.

Source: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/my-week-part-one/

[yingqilin]

Where Do I Even Begin?

Well, first of all, I’ve LOVED LOVED LOVED Qilin ALMOST as much as I loved Unicorns, and Dragon. I say ALMOST because I first saw a unicorn on TV when I was 4 years old in the EARLY 1980s! But, I’d never even heard of a so-called “Chinese Unicorn” since about the mid-late 1980s when I saw a children’s magazine called “Cricket” which had a WHOLE SPREAD about UNICORNS, including the Chinese & Japanese versions.

(I don’t believe this was the actual cover. I can’t remember what year the Cricket Magazine issue was, just that it was in the 1980s. This issue was cited in many books written about Unicorns as well, following its syndication. It had a full on spread including many kinds of unicorns from many cultures... if I recall correctly, there might even have been an French Unicorn story as well.)

When I was a little kid, I actually didn’t like to read (which was an issue by the late 1900s, and even the government would talk about it, the trouble was they’d demonized comic books in the 1960s-1970s, which resulted in that problem, because even tho’ “correlation doesn’t equal causation” they didn’t know that and thought that the act of reading comics made you into a criminal. My experience was the exact opposite, because I read super hero comics a lot and was more interested in THAT than things like doing hard drugs, vandalism, and shoplifting which was rampant in NJ where I grew up.) So, by the late 1980s-early 1990s children were encouraged to read, read, read. Well, I liked pictures, and I LOVED: unicorns, dragons, and dinosaurs, ANYTHING FANTASY, but also Sci-Fi. (I also loved Marvel Comics/X-MEN, and Disney Adventures Magazine, and nearly all the Jeffrey Katzenberg hit Disney Films)

So, whenever it was something of interest to me, I would read a lot, and I had stacks of books, which I also used to practice learning art, and I was self taught. (I have A.D.D.)

I graduated in May 2001 from the Art Institute of Philadelphia (Majored in Computer Animation AKA CAM). And, by the GW Bush Era, I had already been active online since 1994, and had been blogging, and using many various art websites.

By late 2001, and most of the early 2000s (2001-2007) I spent months and even years sketching and drawing Qilin, interacting in the Furry/Anthro Fandom, and published a lot of my works to GeoCites/Yahoo, and had even created my own message boards, and so on. I even had one called “Qilin Savanna” Altho’ much of these sites are gone, my original works still remain on DeviantArt in my gallery HERE. (I also LIVED IN CHINA many times in the GWB Era often.)

Since that time I’d also written a lot of things, multiple times over, about my research into Qilin (which are not all unicorns, just some).

If you were to type in “qilin cartoon” into Google you can actually see the many many photo images that come up since the time I’d first started publishing my work ONLINE, FOR FREE, you can actually see how my works have influenced people. Back then, there was a MAJOR mix-up with the term, because MOST information available in ENGLISH regarding CHINESE EVERYTHING was often inaccurate, used the dead Wade-Giles Chinese language, or were often confused with JAPANESE. Another issue was that I actually could speak standard Mandarin Chinese, but many people wrote the Cantonese names, or FREQUENTLY confused them with Japanese name for the exact same character (AKA kanji, AKA Hanzi), which is “kirin” in Japanese. Also, the majority of NON-Chinese speaking persons don’t know how to pronounce Mandarin pinyin. (Example: Can you pronounce?: chi, qi, shi, xi, zhi, zi, qu, chu, er, ri, ren, si, ran, yu, you, bo, po, zhou, zhu, cao, zui - Most Non-Chinese speakers CANNOT pronounce these correctly at all. “Chi” sounds like “Tcher” and “Qi” sounds like “Tchee”, “Shi” sounds like “scher” and “xi” sounds like “schee”. There are also variations on pronunciation.)

But, I still stuck to the facts. my father-in-law in China,The late Wang Zimin, actually had special access to a restricted library, and wrote letters to me about Qilin, and the 4 major Chinese magical deities: Qilin, Long/Dragon, Fenghuang/Phoenix, Bixi/Dragon-Heard Tortoise.

Back then, mostly you needed to search “kirin” especially because M. Peña called her artwork “Kirin” but still also called them “Chinese Unicorns”. Her gorgeous sculpture works were sold everywhere for years, nation wide, from the boardwalk to Spencer Gifts, to Flea Markets, and Christmas season mall kiosks.

But, as you scroll through all the works produced since that time, not only the ones titled or tagged as "kirin” but over time “Qilin” starts to replace this as more and more people growing up actually start to study Chinese, especially artists and customers, and many of these young artists are either my fans or students, but fans or students of my students... after a while, people forgot who I was... but my work BECAME PART OF THE CULTURE.

You can SEE that many people emulated my poses, my styles of doing hair, and many other details. Over the years, a number of my fans, and friends would send me private messages FREAKING OUT that either someone stole my work, stile my style, or ripped me off...

That’s actually NOT TRUE. No one ripped me off. THOSE ARE MY STUDENTS.

You guys ASKED ME things like: How do you draw _____? so I made countless cheat-sheet style tutorials (because paid classes don’t ACTUALLY TEACH). Also, if someone wants to learn, (like myself) they try to draw from WHAT THEY LOVE. That means ME. MY ARTWORK. How else will they learn if they don’t copy, ask questions, etc.?

I have many many open source materials in my DeviantART gallery (which are STILL MY MOST POPULAR WORKS OF ALL TIME despite the hours of work I’ve produced artistically.) I have also licensed much of my line art works FOR FREE for people to practice coloring with wither digitally, or to print them out and color with real media like markers, color pencils, pastels, or whatever because people kept asking me.

Actually, I would like to credit a number of artists whom are my biggest influences as well:

Susan Dawe

Glen Keane

Alan Davis

Those are my biggest ones, but I also loved artworks by Burne Hogarth,  Auguste Rodin,  Edward Degas (I especially love his ROUGH sketch work), Frank Frazzetta, Boris Vallejo & Julie Belle, Fred Moore, Vladimir “Bill” Tytla,   AND the film The Last Unicorn was especially the #1 thing that got me actually DRAWING when I was 4 years old.

SO much of my work, especially ANYTHING with unicorns, has been tattooed onto people bodies. Many people personally asked my permission, but I honestly DO NOT MIND. I have found over the years more examples of my artwork tattooed onto people than I can count. It’s LOVE.

However, I’ve also many many times been the victim of theft FOR REAL. Many people have tried to rob my sketchbooks, and many companies have illegally robbed my artwork online. It was the cause of MUCH online fights, wars, and battles. There’s also impersonators: People pretending to be ME, or claiming THEY did my work: also the cause of much much online fights and flame wars.

-Then, of course, there’s LOTS & LOTS of kids online that “rob” my work for RPGs, and fan pages... Honestly, I’m NOT going after children, or fans, for harmless things like that... I’m NOT Metallica.

So, where am I going with THIS?

Well, for one, there’s both ART and PHILOSOPHY which are BOTH a MAJOR part of my life.

I had a number of setbacks, delays, and many other strings of very unfortunate events in my life. Needless to say, I was very depressed. However, I did find myself back in college, first for Philosophy, and then for Art, especially Video... which somehow saw me thrust forward into Animation HEAD-FIRST. Suffice it to say, I’ve worked through, blew threw, and past, all of my blocks, and have been doing animation again. (lots more long stories, but not writing them here)

Many many times, you can’t always reach, yet, what you want. Other times, other persons, or groups want to change you, or make you something else.... and not you. But, it kills you inside...

At some point, you need STOP listening to everyone, and everything else, ESPECIALLY if that’s not FLOWING in the direction are are INSIDE.

I’d already WANTED to produce at least 2 series/films of my own. (”Eyewitness” and “Zenith Beyond The Dragon’s Rue”) Well, THIS is a branch off that tree. This stems from my concepts for “Eyewitness” but sort-of... I had ALWAYS wanted to produce my own small animated shorts, especially with music, like the old 20th Century animated works such as “Silly Symphonies”, “Merry Melodies”, and even Disney's “Fantasia”, but also a number of influences from Far East Asia including PR China, and Japan.

I’ve been multiple times inspired by Socrates, Plato, Laozi, Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong), and many fusion artists/dancers on the American West Coat including my teachers: Zoe Jakes, and Alyssum Pole, as well as Rachel Brice, Carolena Nericcio, Jamlila & Suhaila Salimpour, but also Matahari, and Kerli Kõiv. People that think differently, question things, or create their own ideas, or even fusion artists.

Well, this project has been on my mind since at least 2001.

In fact, my actual name (Ming Zi) in Chinese is: 任思麒 (Ren SiQi)

It literally means: Duty/Task [to] Think/Contemplate/Dream of Qi[lin]!

Also, as an artist, there are a number of things I believe in, whereas other things I’ve shed like a snake molting its skin. I’m a fusion artist, an eclectic artist, but I still firmly believe in art fundamentals like life drawing, practicing one’s skills, and I use bot digital and real media. I LOVE TO DRAW. I firmly believe in Quality OVER Quantity, yet, in some instances I also think too much detail is overdo, and somethings look better less refined. I like realism, stylization, cartoons, and beautiful things.

I want to create content that is LESS about “being a big success” or ego driven ideas of “stardom”, and lavish money making, but more about THE LOVE OF IT.

I do NOT want to be part of any establishment groups, crowds, clubs, or institutions, and DON’T want to be mainstream, NOR corporate. I have found all of those things to be negative and destructive to my life and therefore regret pursuing those avenues. I’m NOT interested in walking those paths, nor dunking helplessly into those turbulent or stagnant flows, but RATHER Flow my own way, because I have my OWN PATHS. I don’t need to buy their metaphorical light bulbs, because I have my own light that I can shine inside of me.

And, if I am being completely frank & honest, another MAJOR influence on me WAY BEFORE HE WAS EVEN POPULAR was Bernie Sanders. I am a Berner. Sanders actually GAVE OF HIS HEART & HIS TIME FOR FREE. He crowd funded for what he believed in with SMALL MONEY because he was against BIG MONEY.

I have no care for being in exclusive film festivals or galleries. People whom already LOVE my work find their way to it. People HAVE found value in my efforts and work.

Therefore, I wish to begin producing this animated short. It is not cheap tho’. But, I will gladly share my process, my concept work, my practice work, and everything FOR FREE. Free to ALL ARTISTS, and people whom just live beautiful things, art, and QILIN.

I wish to pursue an independent direction in my art. But, I would very much like to include people, if not the world or those in it that care about these things, to interact with me. A long time ago I’d created my “Qilin Savanna” site to interact with people whom also loved Qilin, Unicorns, Dragons, and other things, but also a love for art, or learning art.

This year (2017) while interacting with MANY MANY young people, and young artists, I often found that people WANTED to learn to DRAW, to improve their techniques and practice them, but despite having paid money to attend art classed (including “drawing classes”) they did not actually get what they paid for, did not actually get instruction for what they wanted to learn, but either had to fend for themselves, try independently, or got resources online for free... so, why then were they paying for it?

I have many many times, spent just a short moment with frustrated peers, students, classmates, friends, and fellow artists whom couldn’t draw what they wanted to, and teased me for being some kind of special person... when in fact, whatever I do, others can too. I sat with them, explained, and demonstrated (AKA Using The Feynman Technique) and after that moment of AHA THEY COULD DO IT. And, they didn’t need to come back. 

I did THAT FOR FREE.

I did THAT FOR LOVE.

And, NO, I DON’T HAVE A MASTER’S DEGREE. Honestly, at this point, I don’t feel I actually want one. I DON’T want to be a part of that club, nor establishment either. In this way, I’m somewhat like Socrates, Diogenes, or Bruce Lee... only NOT. I’m ME. 

I have a lot more to say, but I think I will leave it here for now.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Subtle Art of ‘Hacking’ UFOs

In July of 1853, four immense and mysterious black ships steamed into Tokyo Bay, belching smoke from their tall stacks. The Japanese navy, whose sailing ships made of wood and bearing tall sailed masts, surrounded the mysterious vessels. Sailors stood in awe on their boats' decks, wondering how these four bizarre ironclad ships moved without the support of the wind or sails. 

This small fleet was commanded by the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry on his way to Edo, the capital of Japan, on a mission to force the island nation into trade negotiations. As the cultural communications professor Kazuo Nishiyama described, when the Japanese came face to face with an advanced system of propulsion—in this case, the steam engine—they chose to engage in a complete societal shift, leading to an intense scientific and technological revolution.

Two centuries later, several news outlets reported that naval aviators flying America's finest aircraft off the coast of California in November of 2004 intercepted a bizarre and mysterious object. The pilots, who managed to capture it on video, later recounted its ability to move through the air without wings or a visible propulsion source. According to their testimony, this UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, performed strange maneuvers and accelerated at a rate of speed impossible to reach with today's leading propulsion technology. There have been reports of several other similar incidents. Much like the sailors in Tokyo Bay, these aviators came face to face with the unknown, and they undoubtedly realized that the best tools designed to keep the people on the shore safe stood no chance against whatever this new technology was. 

The recent UFO incidents involving the US Navy and unidentified aerial incursions into American airspace have left the public wondering what is going on. If we put the speculation concerning Hollywood aliens and government conspiracies to one side, we are left with an irrefutable issue: Something is up there and enjoying free reign over sovereign airspace. For a handful of security experts, scientists, and entrepreneurs, that something is worth investigating. And some see the contemporary quest to investigate UAP as a source for novel ideas and technological innovation.

"We are not a company that runs away from hard problems, we run to them," said Ben Lamm, the CEO of Hypergiant Industries, a Texas-based technology and AI company. "I believe in diving into things that scare people. If we do not address our fears, they will eat us alive."

Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and former video game developer who has sold his previous companies to significant players like Accenture and Zynga. Holding various defense and industrial contracts with the US Air Force, Booz Allen Hamilton, NASA, Shell, the Department of Homeland Security, and other major private and government agencies, he finds the idea of UFOs intriguing. 

"I am concerned with answering big questions about the universe, and unknown aerial phenomena are currently a big question," Lamm said in an interview with Motherboard. "Right now, we know there are UAP. We have multiple videos that have been validated by both our military and leading and established news outlets. There is no reason not to leverage AI and data. We have to try to solve these questions."

Lamm views the question around UAP as a sort of "moonshot." Getting to the moon was the goal, but the technology developed to make that journey possible was revolutionary. Lamm is unsure if UFOs are real, but he believes that using technology to figure it out will lead to novel and even game-changing technologies. 

In February, Motherboard reported that Lamm was developing CONTACT, or the Contextually Organized Non-Terrestrial Active Capture Tool. According to Lamm, the platform will be made up of satellites utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence to passively monitor the skies. Using advanced radar technology, known as wave induction radar and inverse synthetic aperture radar, the system will filter out known objects such as commercial jetliners and be able to collect data and image, in three dimensions, any unknown objects in the sky.

For Lamm, part of the solution to the mystery is using data to identify and track these unknown objects. The benefit of using technology that sounds vaguely like something out of an Iron Man movie, Lamm believes, is that as the data begin to come in, a better picture can be painted of what these objects are.  

This is not the first time a project using intelligence gathering to investigate anomalous aerial objects has been launched. In 2008, the Defense Intelligence Agency initiated the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, to investigate UFO incidents. The program's overall goal was to investigate UFO sightings and establish new theories concerning how these objects worked. In June of this year, Motherboard reported that Senator Marco Rubio introduced a bill demanding the Department of Defence and the office of the Director of National Intelligence generate a report to divulge what exactly the various military and intelligence branches are doing regarding UAP incursions. The bill disclosed that the government—chiefly the Office of Naval Intelligence—was actively engaged in continuing AATIP's mission. 

"Congress appropriated funds for UAP research but did not mandate that the Department of Defence or intelligence departments or agencies support the AATIP program," Chris Mellon, the former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, told Motherboard in an interview. "Perhaps AATIP's sponsors on the Hill naively thought the DoD bureaucracy would operate in good faith and do its best to support the AATIP investigation, but that didn't happen. So AATIP was isolated rather than integrated and seemed to have made limited headway."

Currently, Mellon is an advisor for Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and regularly appears on History Channel's Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation. Before that, he spent a decade working on Capitol Hill in various security and intelligence roles.

"I was shocked to learn that naval aviators and carrier battle groups were detecting scores of UAPs off the East Coast. What thoroughly outraged me, however, was the fact that this information was being suppressed, and these units were getting no support. From an intelligence perspective, I found that totally unacceptable," Mellon said. American airspace was seemingly being violated repeatedly by unknown and advanced aircraft. According to Mellon, senior US military and civilian officials were not being issued warnings concerning these incursions. Mellon considers it an "intelligence failure."

"Regardless of their origin or intent, the intelligence community is failing the nation if unidentified aircraft can reconnoiter DoD operations for months and years on end without any notification of senior officials in a position to respond," Mellon said. "To date, there seems to be little if any contribution to DoD technology resulting from the study of UAPs because DoD is only beginning to awaken and take the issue seriously."

The former head of the Pentagon's AATIP program, Luis Elizondo, agrees with Mellon's overall assessment, but explained that after leaving the Pentagon's UAP program in 2017, things have changed.

"Unfortunately, I cannot speak officially as to the current nature of the UAP Task Force, but I have every indication to believe that it is up and running, and is executing the mission consistent with the fundamental principles of AATIP," Elizondo told Motherboard in an interview. Elizondo explained that the current task force has better resources and "is far more robust" than AATIP was while he served with the Pentagon. However, seeing that the overall mission is to not only investigate but to "understand" how these objects work, more funding would be beneficial.

"Let's look at it this way. Say we want to know how a new Russian aircraft works. We can collect information on it. We can talk to people who've flown it. We can talk to the company that makes it. But the best way to understand it is to try and get your hands on one, and exploit it so you can make your own version of it," Elizondo said.  

Alongside these official endeavors, the UFO community continues unabated to engage in research. While the government is still interested in the subject, the grassroots UFO community has always tried to find its own solutions. And as technology continues to develop, astute operators attempt new ways to collect data on UAP. 

"If you look at UFO videos or pictures, they are usually poor quality, blurry, or just pictures that appear to be light backscatter," said Steve McDaniel, a Maryland-based software engineer. He has worked for defense contractors and other Big Data companies like Intel. "Our goal is to enable the collection of high fidelity data from all over the world to create a data set that is worthy of scientific research." 

McDaniel and his colleagues are developing Sky Hub. This open-source observational platform collects video and sensor data of unknown aerial phenomena and aggregates it from trackers worldwide into a central public database. 

"Essentially, this comes down to developing a platform and an approach to performing Observational Science on the phenomenon. We're providing the tools to do just that," McDaniel told Motherboard in an interview. 

According to the Sky Hub website, the hardware for the Sky Hub is community-driven, and anyone can build their system from parts bought off Amazon. According to McDaniel, a decent SkyHub rig consists of an NVIDIA Jetson Nano microcomputer, various sensors such as a GPS receiver and a Witmotion module, and an HD camera. Such a system can cost anywhere between $300 and $1000. The software is free and open-source on GitLab. 

"Developing an observation science platform is time-consuming and has taken me a significant amount of work. I've invested thousands of hours architecting, developing, and implementing the entire system," McDaniel said. Initially, he was the only engineer on the project, but has since been joined by software developer Corey Gaspard. 

"Engineers join open source projects because they believe in the goals of the project. All personal beliefs are put aside with Sky Hub. The project is making no assumptions. If engineers want to know the answer about what UAPs are, then we welcome them to find the answer with us," McDaniel said, noting that finding engineers was difficult. The UAP subject still has a significant stigma attached to it; McDaniel said that the best way to reduce that stigma is to provide repeatable and verifiable data. 

"Most UAP events in the past have only had eyewitness testimony, which is unreliable. Sky Hub systems will provide hard data on events that cannot be disputed," McDaniel said 

Hunting UFOs aside, McDaniel sees a significant scientific value to the project. 

"As the Sky Hub network grows, it may be possible to use our dataset to track bird migration patterns, make use of detailed weather and atmospheric data, and understanding on a large scale how different events (observed by video with associated sensor data) affect the local environment. And all of this data collection will be tagged with GPS time and location," he said. 

"Technology has long been influenced by what we would call 'science fiction,'" said Dr. Matthew Hersch, who teaches the history of science at Harvard. He noted that even as early as the 13th century, the best minds imagined automobiles and elevators; human ideas have always circled the imagining of impossible things. 

"People can imagine much more than they can ever build, and UFO mythologies embrace a variety of propositions that are flat-out impossible or technically foolish," Hersch told Motherboard. "Given these and other limitations, I don't have a great deal of confidence in the ability to harvest astounding new technologies from UFO rumors. There is very little these rumors provide that is new, and aerospace engineers have been trying to make sense of them for 70 years without success."

Like Lamm and McDaniel, Mellon argues that aerial anomalies are "potential gold for both science and intelligence." Unfortunately, they are attached to a deep-rooted stigma that dissuades legitimate scientific pursuit and hinders professional reputations.

"This is a terrible mismatch for what is supposed to be a curious, inquisitive, open-minded, and scientific intelligence community," Mellon said. "Those providing new information and insights should be rewarded rather than penalized." McDaniel concurs, claiming that finding engineers to come work on Sky Hub is difficult because they don't want to attach themselves to something that deals with UFOs. Lamm also recognizes the problem, but notes that the vast majority of technological developments we enjoy today were once impossible.

"When we decide something is impossible or 'science fiction,' we forget that nearly everything was once seemingly impossible: flying, driving, satellites, landing on the moon. Yet human ingenuity has proved over and over again that nothing is impossible," Lamm said. "It is this inquiry into the impossible that makes giant breakthroughs in human progress. UFOs may not exist, but trying to figure out if they do (and looking at this question cross-functionally) is the sort of challenge that will force humanity to think in new ways, imagine new possibilities and develop technologies that may otherwise seem impossible." 

Whether the UFO phenomenon is a total delusion, a hoax, or something fundamentally more interesting, there is little doubt that the mythos has driven much imagination. However, if there is some genuinely unknown aspect to unidentified aerial phenomena, humanity may be heading towards its next great technological revolution. After all, all it took for Japan to restructure its nation were four American gunboats chugging towards Edo.

The Subtle Art of ‘Hacking’ UFOs syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT EMPLOYEES

Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. And that helps overcome their understandable fear of investing in a company run by marketing guys. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person.1 Their answers were remarkably similar. Why? And of course there's another kind of investor you simply cannot replace: the startups' founders and early employees. What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not the hope of good returns, but the three main ones are internal disputes, inertia, and ignoring users.

And I think that's precisely why people put it off. But I did not till recently understand the role risk played. I think hiring people is the worst kind. I liked. I'm talking about filtering my mail based on the actual mail he receives. You can tell just by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. I want to spend as little time inside the minds of spammers as possible. Another sign of how little the initial idea, and from that point all you have to understand them. That's probably roughly how we looked when we were a couple of important details. The fifteen most interesting words are as follows: continuation 0. Corporate M & A is a strange business in that respect.

And the Internet makes copies easy to distribute. And from that point the chain reaction started. For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google.2 This helps to distinguish between words that occasionally do occur in legitimate email and words that almost never do. If these guys were hackers, not MBAs, and so far no spam that does. Again by trial and error I chose. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking are you with us or against us? More precisely, the hypothesis was that success in a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. When most people think of startups, they think of companies like Apple or Google have offices there, but that they're driven by more powerful motivations. But in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter?

They gradually congeal in your head is not to search for information using something like the current Google? The project may even grow into a startup. They remind us that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of person who would like to solve the problem with scraps of paper I could find. Paths can bend a lot more than money. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. And the customers paying so much for their kids to go to their site and change your account preferences if you want to give money to the people who make the most money are those who aren't in it just for the initial stages. For example, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them.

What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Fortunately the statistical approach for so long. To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there working on the same thing: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. It's true they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention. Why can't defenders score goals too? This technique won't find us all the answers, though. I think it's the feeling that each building is the work of a distinct group of people. I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. 99. Some tribes may avoid wrong as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like negative or destructive.

Some of them, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. Would that mean sitting on too many boards? It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. Perhaps the best policy is to make it close.3 How many points should an email get for having the word sex is not going to go out of business; they feel obliged by various state laws to include boilerplate about why their spam is not spam, and c perhaps best of all makes it hard for spammers to make their mails indistinguishable from your ordinary mail. Most startups that fail do it because they don't know it. If the answer is yes. So you have to decide who the founders are, and that is exactly the spirit you want. But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target. This site isn't lame.

What difference does it make how many others there are? There's something pleasing about a secret project. The spammers wouldn't say these things if they didn't. Icio. I'm more hopeful about Bayesian filters, because they evolve with the spam. In my earlier spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. If you argue against censorship in general, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities.

If you have something impressive, try to put it, because it's clearer in the sciences that heresy pays off. It will take more experience to know for sure, but my guess is that it worked. If you believe everything you're supposed to be? Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. So I asked them, what do you do? A word like shortest is almost as much evidence for innocence as a word like madam or promotion is for guilt. I don't know enough about the infrastructure that spammers use to know how hard it would be April 1st. Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to work in, apartments tend to be all too familiar. This should yield a much sharper estimate of the probability. And just as there is in Boston.

Notes

No.

And when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders, a proper open-source projects, even to inexperienced founders should avoid raising money in order to pick up a solution, and those are writeoffs from the Dutch baas, meaning they give it additional funding at a large chunk of time. Several people have historically been so many had been raised religious and then scale it up because they are not in the Greek classics. When I say in principle get us up to the hour Google was in a traditional series A round VCs put two partners on your board, consisting of two things: what bad taste you had in school math textbooks are not mutually exclusive.

But the most successful startups. And I'm sure for every startup founder could pull the same gestures but without using them to get out of Viaweb, which is the last 150 years we're still only able to protect against truly determined attackers.

Thanks to Jeff Clavier, Ross Boucher, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, and Robert Morris for inviting me to speak.

[anycontentposter]

2010-2019: The decade in review - technological advancements

The latest AF systems mean I can take for granted that the photo will be focused where I want it to be, so I can think about composition, concentrate on interacting with my subject and capture the right moment.Photo: Richard Butler

My colleague Barney has already had a look at the broader trends in the industry over the past ten years, so it's fallen to me to have a look at how the technology has changed in that time. From the perspective of someone who's spent all of the last decade testing and reviewing cameras I'm going to argue that the two biggest areas of improvement and change have been autofocus and video.

Autofocus improvements

Barney wrote that in 2010 we had 'DSLRs with highly advanced autofocus systems,' while the early mirrorless autofocus systems were often slow and clumsy. But in the decade that's followed, we've seen mirrorless AF not only catch up to DSLRs, but to begin to offer greater capabilities, often in an easier-to-use manner and across a much broader range of the market.

You don't need to buy a D300S-level camera to get what used to be considered 'pro-grade' AF performance: you can find it, and a lot more, in sub-$1000 cameras that you can essentially point and shoot with. A number of changes that have brought us to this point.

Lenses designed for mirrorless

One of the biggest changes is probably the hardest to see: a change in the way lenses are designed. The the brute force approach of ring-type focus motors and unit focus designs (moving a unit with multiple lens elements) used in DSLRs isn't a good fit for the way most mirrorless cameras need to operate.

Those large focus elements meant a lot of inertia, which is a problem for the back-and-forth movements required by contrast-detection autofocus. Secondly, while ring-type motors are great at moving quickly, they're not the best choice for moving slowly, smoothly and quietly, as required for video shooting.

The original Olympus OM-D E-M5 was one of the first mirrorless cameras whose lenses helped it to focus at least as quickly as it kit-lens equipped DSLR peers (for single AF acquisition at least). It was also the first camera to offer eye-priority autofocus.

In recent years we've seen many manufacturers change their optical designs so that they can be focused with a single, lightweight focusing element. With less inertia, these can be moved with greater subtlety. The latest lenses often feature two independent focus groups, helping to avoid any deterioration in quality at close-focus distances.

The retractable design of Canon's RF 70-200mm F2.8 has caught all the attention, but the use of independent focus groups, both light enough to be driven by innovative 'Nano USM' motors, is also a huge departure from its DSLR counterpart.

Alongside changes in optical design, we've also seen the development of new types of focus motor, usually less powerful than ring-type ultrasonic motors but instead able to provide both speed and precision control for these small-focus-element lenses. The overall result is a new generation of lenses that can perform as well or faster than their DSLR predecessors, while also providing visually smooth focus for video.

On-sensor phase detection

In parallel, we've seen the development of on-sensor phase detection technologies. First appearing in Fujifilm compacts, then Nikon's 1-series mirrorless cameras, before being widely adopted by other companies. At their most simple, these systems selectively look at the scene through the left and right sides of the lens, building up a sense of depth in the scene, much as humans do by comparing the information from their left and right eyes.

Canon took on-sensor phase detection one step further: its dual-pixel design uses split pixels to let it derive distance information from every location.

This depth information is then used to assess which direction and how far to drive the focus element, much as the dedicated sensor AF did on DSLRs.

Subject-aware AF

The other major leap forward has been in subject-aware autofocus. Nikon in particular had made some steps in this direction using its DSLRs' RGB metering sensors, but the move, with mirrorless, to focusing using the main imaging sensor has allowed cameras to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of what they're shooting.

The latest generation of cameras are beginning to use AF algorithms trained by machine learning

Face Detection had featured in compact cameras for some time, but the power and accuracy of such systems has changed completely in the past few years. Olympus introduced eye-detection AF in 2012's E-M5 and such systems have only got more responsive and more reliable as further development, greater processing power and input from on-sensor phase detection have progressed.

Which brings us almost up to the present. The latest generation of cameras from Panasonic and Sony use AF algorithms trained by machine learning (analysis of thousands of images), that let the cameras recognize what they're focusing on. This lets them stay focused on people or pets without getting confused if the subject turns away from the camera. To the point that the latest $600 mirrorless camera will give a 2010 pro-sports camera a run for its money. Perhaps even in the hands of a beginner.

The Sony a6100 is a pretty modest model in many respects, but it has an AF system that's both easy to use and in many respects more powerful than the pro DSLRs of ten years ago.

I didn't notice the full impact these changes had made to my photography until this article forced me to think back to how I shot cameras in 2010. Back then I'd have mainly stuck to AF-S, solely using AF-C for sports shooting, and would have expected to have to keep the camera pointed at my subject, when doing so. These days I take for granted being able to leave most cameras in AF-C and use AF tracking for almost everything. And the cameras with responsive eye detection have become the ones I most enjoy for portrait shooting, simply because it frees me up to talk to my subject and devote more of my brain to lighting and composition: knowing the subject will be in focus.

This is only likely to continue to improve, especially as traditional cameras try to stay competitive with the smartphones backed by the computing know-how and seemingly endless R&D resources of the likes of Apple and Google.

Video advances

The other obvious change of the last decade has been the ever evolving quality and capability of video capture in stills cameras. Ten years ago, video from stills cameras was in its infancy: the Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II had brought high resolution video to consumer cameras just a year before, and Canon was seen as the preeminent video tool for keen videographers and small production companies.

Ten years later and we're testing a camera that can produce 4K footage good enough for high-end professional video production, and even the sub-$1000 models from most brands are packed with an array of video tools that easily eclipse the 5D Mark II.

I remember being amazed when I first saw this clip from the GH3 on a 1080 TV. I also remember how piercing the sound was, as Clan Line passed inches from my head, as I shot it.

To an extent, much of the story can be told by following the progression of Panasonic's GH series. After the success of the EOS 5D II, Canon switched a lot of its video efforts on the more pro-focused Cinema EOS line, leaving the way clear for Panasonic to produce a succession of stills/video cameras with ever more high-end video features and ever more impressive output.

The GHs were some of the first stills/video cameras with 1080p video, the first to shoot 1080/60p, the first to shoot 4K video and the first to shoot 10-bit footage. They were also some of the first cameras we saw to include features like focus peaking, adjustable zebra exposure indicators and, more recently, vectorscopes and waveform displays.

The Panasonic GH5S became the first stills/video camera to offer a waveform display for assessing video exposure.

There's also perhaps a history to be written about the hacking projects that helped extend the capabilities of both Canon and Panasonic's video cameras (which perhaps made clear to manufacturers how dedicated and eager the audience for such cameras was).

These camera in particular have been responsible for much of what I've learned about video shooting: each successive model has forced me to go off and learn or go out shooting to make sure I appreciated how each feature and spec addition helps for videography.

Having to learn to shoot video for the reviews I've written has kindled a real personal interest videography

Sony brought many of these things to the mass market, incorporating many of these specs and features to its more mainstream models. Panasonic's GX8 beat the a6300 to the punch, in terms of offering 4K, but the Sony added previously exotic features such as Log capture, which inspired me to embark on my first proper video shoot.

But video is no longer the preserve of Panasonic and Sony. I doubt anyone would have predicted the speed with which Fujifilm has gone from producing some of the worst video in the industry to some of the best. Interestingly, things have almost come full circle; with Nikon offering Raw video output from its Z6 and bundling the camera with a gimbal and external recorder for budding film makers. That's fair leap forward compared with the D90.

Shooting this video involved learning to use a one-handed gimbal, which is tremendous fun. The final result is probably the creative work I'm most proud of, from the last ten years.

Interestingly, these developments are beginning to dovetail with AF changes I described. In much the same way that Pro sports shooters are still unlikely to depend on subject tracking, many professional videographers will continue to depend on their own skills and experience. But for the rest of us? Video autofocus is only going to get better at maintaining focus where we want it, or smoothly transitioning between selected subjects.

These improvements in video and autofocus will just make life easier, meaning we can concentrate on the creative aspects that matter.

Read more about this at dpreview.com

https://coolarticlespinner.com/2010-2019-the-decade-in-review-technological-advancements/