#so many times the way to convert it into equations seemed obvious

[esoanem]

@jonaldronaldrolkientolkien

imo math is best when it involves a lot of diagrams scrutable only to you and worst when it involves a bunch of really messy equations.

[wolfstar-in-color]

What Are Image Descriptions and Why Are They Necessary?

Hello, colorful cuties! In the ongoing spirit of Disability Pride Month, we want to take some time this week to talk about image descriptions! Maybe you’ve noticed, we add these to every image we share, and we’d love to see a bit more attention to these in the wider, wonderful world of the wolfstar fandom. 

So, first things first: what is an image description?

For the most part, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a textual description that details, in words, what is depicted in an image, graphic, or gifset.  

Why are they necessary?

Two reasons. First, to make your visual content accessible to blind and low-vision folks, or folks who - for a variety of reasons - cannot look at the image (some examples would be people experiencing severe headaches or migraines exasperated by images or bright colors, people with severe color-sensitive epilepsy, autistic people with low tolerance for imagery, etc.). Many blind, low-vision, or otherwise visually sensitive people use text readers or Braille converters, which read aloud or convert to Braille the words on the screen - but most of them don’t know what to do with images, and thus skip them all together (the technology required to automatically describe images is coming! Exciting!) Second, to make your visual accessible to people without access to technology robust enough to support the image, for example, rural folks without access to broadband internet strong enough to load digital images. 

Sure, but that can’t be that many people, right?

It’s more than you might think. 253 million people worldwide are blind or low-vision [source]. That’s more than 3% of everyone (and yes, I had to google that equation). In addition, 6% of the population of the United States does not have access to consistent broadband internet [source]. In Australia, that number is more than double [source]. Basically, what we’re saying is, that’s a lot of people who can’t engage with your wonderful visual work.

What kind of things need an image description?

Visual art (such as the amazing fanart so prolific in our fandom) is an obvious example, but gifsets, tiktoks, and videos of any kind also need image descriptions, as well as banners and headers.

Image descriptions are awkward, and I don’t know how to write them.

That’s okay, you’re not alone! If you’ve never written or encountered an image description, it can seem daunting and uncomfortable. We invite you to try it anyway! Throughout the rest of this week, we’ll be highlighting some useful resources and tip sheets on how to do this better. 

I want to start writing Image Descriptions for some of the older art I love, but I��m worried I’ll describe something in a way that is offensive or incorrect.

We also worry about that, we’re still in the learning process too. We’ve learned that it’s important to include such things as skin color and race, body shapes, landscapes, etc., even when it feels awkward. Luckily, people much more qualified than us have some thoughts on doing this better. Stay tuned for our Resources Wednesday!

I’ve made some new visual content that I really want to share, but I’m not great with words - what can I do to make sure my work is still accessible?

You know your work best, and as such, you’re the best person to describe it. But if you just can’t find the words - or the task is prohibitively overwhelming to you, or maybe comes up against your own disabilities or limitations - that’s okay! We’d recommend asking a friend (maybe a fandom friend!) to help you out, or if you can afford it, paying a service or person to do it for you. Similarly, if you are someone who is good with words and descriptions, maybe offer to do them for your fandom friends!

Can I put it off and add it later?

Ask yourself this: would you upload an image/gifset/video that was incomplete? Well, maybe some of you would. But for the most part, you probably have a process. Maybe you outline a drawing, add shading, add color, and then upload (can you tell I’m not an artist?). Maybe you edit your gifs or videos a certain way. A piece of visual art without an image description is incomplete - it cannot be “seen” by a significant chunk of the population, and both you and we want your work to be seen! So we’d recommend just tacking adding an image description onto the end of your process. 

Okay, you’ve convinced me that image descriptions are necessary. What’s a good way to get started?

Stay tuned the remainder of this week for guides, tips, and an account from one of your mods about their own experience of becoming more comfortable with image descriptions. Or, just jump right on in! We hope to see more of these in our glorious fandom soon. 

[hopeymchope]

also, playing devils advocate (because my mind tends to do so automatically), I'm wondering if the AoT author was trying to spread a message of 'hate can't be fought with hate'. Just... well even if that was the cased, he f***ed up big time with how he wrote it. That type of transformation isn't immediate; takes time and effort and at some point an earnest desire to change and a recognition of your own faults. And he really screwed it up if that was his intent. cnt in next ask.

Yes, I think that’s exactly what Hajime Isayama is trying to say, at least. He’s sort of retroactively blaming the series’ main character (Eren Jaeger) for being so driven by anger and rage and painting him as this dark, hateful figure in this last act - even making the love for his closest friends and family something that is now a negative driver for him, because it’s making him selfish and he’s putting it above any other horrors his hate may cause, directly or indirectly. Isayama keeps making more and more parallels between Gabi, the easily-forgiven Nazi soldier of Marley, and Eren - in the latest chapter, Gabi even looks in the mirror and adjusts their hair in a way that exactly matches Eren’s hair, showing elements of his reflection looking at her. Her entire facial structure is actually based on a drawing Isayama did years ago of a “gender-bent” Eren.

So it seems clear that Isayama is attempting drawing a parallel between the Eren’s intense hatred for the titans that destroyed his hometown, devoured his mother, and trapped all humanity inside of a walled cage… and on the other side, Gabi’s hatred of the Jews Eldians who ummm have been kept in fenced-in ghettos and executed en masse around her for her entire life, and uhhhhhhh regular humans who are abused and rounded up into camps and slaughtered are NOT actually the same as gigantic man-eating creatures that crush your city and destroy your hometown and eat your family, oh my GOD.

So yeah, there’s something going on here about “hate is always wrong” - I mean, it’s not like Gabi’s hate for the Eldians is portrayed as a GOOD thing, at least. Thank god for that. But it IS portrayed as something easily forgiven and “understandable” in light of her being raised in a society where that kind of hate was valued. Except… every other character in her squadron is already made aware of the cruelty and horror they are visiting upon innocent people long before Gabi ever wakes up to it. I guess maybe Isayama wanted her anger and hate to get a ton of focus time where we’re supposed to understand that her hatred and rage at them is no different than Eren’s hate and rage, except… it’s really, really not the same thing at all, as I’ve just established. Not remotely.

Plus there are many other reasons they are NOT logically parallels.

SUCH AS:

When Eren first learns that the Titans are actually created out of regular people (which I think most of us probably assumed just by looking at them, but… ), he struggles with that a bit. It’s a horrifying fact. Everybody in our group of Eldian heroes has a moment of difficulty over it. Even Levi, who sheds blood with barely any emotion, has an internal crisis over that. Eventually, the time comes when our squadron must directly face other human beings in battle, and that’s another major moment where they all can barely believe they’re going to have to take the lives of living, breathing people. Eren goes through a lot of self-doubt here.

Gabi, on the other hand, is introduced to us in a scene where she laughs with glee as she blows up a train full of human beings. And when Gabi starts to see Eldians acting sympathetic and kind and her own squadmates are converting and turning against the beliefs they were raised with, Gabi doubles-down on wanting the Eldians destroyed. 

No matter how much he may draw them the same way, Gabi isn’t Eren. You can’t equate those two. They are fundamentally different. And it drives me nuts how he’s trying to retroactively paint them like “Oh Eren was always this bad and Gabi is the same way.”

Like… what the actual fuck.

As for them being “literal nazis,” god, I need to write a post up about just HOW OBVIOUS the “Marley = Nazi Germany” and “Eldians = Jewish people” parallels are, because there are still many segments of the fandom are choosing to cope with this story arc by denying that these parallels exist. And it makes me want to scream. They’re friggin’ undeniable. So… that’s another post that’s coming. Yup. Sigh.

[dayshasource]

Shaping the World and Young Women.

Born atheist, but converted to Islam, G. Willow Wilson the author of Ms. Marvel spoke to students, and faculty about her comic book last Wednesday at Moraine Valley community college in which she spoke about her conversion, and why she chose to write about a Pakistani Muslim girl named Kamala Khan that has polymorphism. 

             Wilson is an atheist born but converted to Islam who was asked by Marvel writers to create a comic about a Muslim girl with polymorphism. Polymorphism is the power to transform and reshape the form of one's body. Being that Khan is Pakistani, shown as a hero is different because she is the only Muslim superhero in the marvel cinematic universe, so she is a different kind of superhero who shows different groups of people that they can to be heroes. 

                On Apr 10. at noon inside the theater of the F building, which moraine doesn’t host their book events there often, “At the fine and performing arts center, we seldom offer these types of book or author events. Those are most often curated by the library. This specific event, however, was a collaboration with the library and because Wilson is so well-known, we felt that the theater was a better venue to accommodate larger audiences,” says Tommy Hensel who is the managing director of the one and performing arts center.

 I asked him what are these events called and why they host them, “every year, the library picks one text and creates a year-long series of events called ‘One Book/One college.’ For this academic year, they picked the “ms. marvel” graphic novels by Willson. That choice was part of a collaboration with the fine and performing arts center and a program we have been running called ‘Mosaics: Muslim Voices in America.’ That program was funded by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals for the Building Bridges: Arts, Culture and Identity program. Moraine Valley, along with one consortium and three other individual organizations, received funding to build knowledge, and appreciation for arts and culture with roots in Muslim-majority societies. This grant program is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and helps support mission-critical projects that demonstrate the power of the arts to strengthen communities and increase intercultural understanding across America. Moraine Valley’s specific project is titled Mosaics: Muslim Voices in America and our focus is to highlight the artistic and cultural diversity of Muslim artists living and working in the United States.”  Hensel says which is amazing because there were so many young Muslim students at the event that day, mostly women, who are most likely inspired by her writing and the storyline. 

One woman was a fan of the marvel comics, which was obvious because she wore her captain marvel shirt which is a new movie that just been released in March which finally got one billion in the box office. She is the first woman in the Marvel cinematic universe to have her own movie and to reach one billion ticket sales.

The event was located in the Dorothy Menker Theater. I and my friend Ana decided to sit in the front. Behind us was a class from Argo High School. There were at least 20 students apart from that class and about 40 people overall in the theater. To my right was an interpreter signing for a few deaf students, and to my left was a group of professors and equational the cameraman would jump on stage and snap photos. After waiting for ten minutes Wilson took the stage. I couldn’t fully tell what she had on, because she was behind the podium but I caught the sight of her hijab which was white and Hensel announced his thanks to everyone for being there and did an intro before he walked off stage to give Wilson the room. The screen above us had the book cover which I’ve noticed. Wilson’s family were atheists so she wasn’t raised in a religious household. She thought about converting to Islam because as a teen she was so invested in religion and reading a lot about it and when she was in college she was exposed to it as well, but since 9/11, it set her back from doing so. “Is this is? Are they right and I’m wrong?” She says. After graduating she moved to Egypt to teach English and she finally converted. Since then the audience seemed very interested in what she had to say. A group of young Muslim girls that go to moraine came to get a closer to listen. Everyone was now focused on her as she spoke lively about her new life.  “It was very much a matter of kind of living a double life for a time and not reviewing bits of me to the people I love the most and I’m feeling really guilty about it and guilty about feeling like some kind of betrayal by taking this radical departure from the life that is expected of me and I wrestled with it for a long time but coming to a place where I can talk about it with the people I love is something that helped,” Wilson says as I looked around, and see people’s elbows were on their legs, they were pushed forward trying to listen closely to the story on how she went from atheist to Muslim. A few years after Marvel came to her to start the idea to write a comic about a Muslim superhero.

At the time she didn’t know what the Khan background is going to be what costume she was going to wear and what her powers she is going to have. 

“Your story is about belonging,” Sanaa Omna says her to help her get a sense of how Khan's storyline will go. “I was interested in making her power something more kinetic, something more visually interesting something that wasn’t necessarily pretty and sparkly but with more visceral that was kind of weird.” So that’s when she settled on polymorphism. She can become really big, really small and she can bend the laws of physics. 

She brings up how she relates to Khan and the other characters in her own way since she never grew up with being Muslim and also that she’s white and not brown. 

“I think all of us in our teenage years are trying to figure out who we are in relation to the people around us. Trying to cycle all your life and keep a major development away from your parents and people you grew up with and I think that almost feels like more and the way handled her superpowers from anything else not that I view as converting religion as getting superpowers if so that would be awesome. But that feeling was very well known to me I have the secret I don’t have to tell I don't know if it’s a bad thing, something I should share this with people, I don’t know how to feel about it. So that way she deals with her superpowers and who do she tells and who she not tell is me trying to be right in vitally context by Omni stories and by the things she felt were important to include and that was the matter of making myself quiet and not bring myself into the stories except as a sidekick you know there is a lot of me in Bruno, there is a lot of me in Zoey I felt like it was important to have those characters there.”

At the time when Marvel asked her write the comic Wilson got very shocked and it came out of nowhere. “I got a call from Omna who at that point was an editor from X men, authors, at marvel comics and I met with her briefly we had lunch with a mutual friend and kinda empathized with each other because at that point we were the only two Muslim women working The entire mainstream American superhero industry just us and we haven’t spoken since then so I was not expecting that call much less was I expecting her to say so we had this idea we want to create a new American Muslim superhero on her own ongoing book and we would like you to help develop his character,” Wilson says as one of the professors pulled out her phone and started recording, “that’s utter madness, I had at that point my relatively short career in comics accrued already a certain number of threats from some serious, some not for writing that hadn't nothing to with religion with politics with anything that can be considered remotely controversial and write two entirely unremarkable fill-in issues on superman and get threats,” she finishes. Wilson went on to speak about her challenges writing the story. 

“We almost romanticize the idea that if you are under a threat you must have said something really important and out there and it kinda makes you a more important figure than you were otherwise when in actual fact I said nothing very remarkable and it did not feel excited or dangerous in a fun way or all American to have to deal with this threat and it felt like I had done something wrong because I was the one who has a police escort which is not the most fun and I was the one who couldn't use the bathroom like a normal person or go into the building the normal way,” she spoke confidently.

         It was very interesting seeing her writing a character who is Muslim/Pakistani when she’s not. Someone can only know so much about someone’s culture. She decided to step away from ms. marvel this year to give young Muslim authors a chance to give Khan more of a story since she isn’t born into the culture or religion because being born into that and growing up with it is a whole different experience. She thought so as well. It’s amazing of her to do that since she has been with Khan for so long but her thinking about young Muslim readers and wanting more for those readers is a thoughtful thing to do.

              “We never thought this landscape would have changed so much artistically politically with this character to be embraced by so many people and that there will be this amazing dynamic and crap of young Muslim writers who will rise together and love this character and take her on as their own.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS ARE SOFTWARE PATENTS EVIL

Whereas when students or professors build something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems—perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from having prices online. There I found a copy of something they made, but they aren't the only places that do. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say will you play with me? Unfortunately that's not easy. I'd just left. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is the place to attack them. Can, perhaps, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of poking around that leads to new ideas has to be more productive because there are no distractions.

So the kind of people you find now in America. It works. Most large organizations and many small ones are steeped in it. E-commerce partnerships, we were just as frightened when we started Viaweb. When you do this you can assume unlimited resources. Defense contractors? It was obvious to us as programmers that these sites would have to invent something for it to do. Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.

If the hundred year language were available today, would we want to program in today. The more succinct the language, so you need a lot of time doing it. If you're writing for other people you have, if you did a really good job, you could make your fortune. I was considering starting another startup. The super-angels have appeared. They're happy to buy only a few percent of you. The most obvious advantage of not needing money is that you should be smarter. But there are things you can do better work: Because we're relaxed, it's so much easier to fix problems before the company is a good idea should seem obvious, when you can say about something is to be fanatically attentive to customers' needs. So all the people who wouldn't like that idea: the ones who like running their company so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? There is rarely a single brilliant hack that ensures success: I learnt never to bet on now. In some fields the way to succeed is to have a good guide from one to the other.

Raising money is terribly distracting. People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the time, just like they do. In most places, if you roll a zero for luck, the outcome is the product of skill, determination, and luck. Millions of people have pets. This is a talk I gave at the last dinner; it's more of a problem is already half its solution. Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. What does it mean to disagree well? Assume you won't get money, and making money consists mostly of errands. Such influence can be so pervasive that its effects could still be completely mistaken. Airbnb is a classic example.

Fundamentally the equation is a brutal one: you have to assume that someone, they're not sure exactly who, will want what they're building is so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up. If the founders know what they're trying to avoid being trampled by elephants. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. The source of the problem you're exploring. But now that convertible notes are becoming the norm, actually raise the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I don't think it is good to have the same fat white book lying open on it. You can tell how hard it was to get some other company to buy it. My goal here is not to try hard enough. Since board seats last about 5 years and each partner can't handle more than about 10 at once, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. You can see it in old photos.

If it isn't, imagine what you would say, and use that instead. More or less. Hipness is another thing you wouldn't have seen on the list that are surprising in how much a startup differs from a job. I know I repeat this, but they could imagine other people wanting it. And that's one of our specialties at YC. One of the most characteristic solutions are not far removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence by sentence. If they make your life so good that you don't want to leave. We avoided dying till we got rich. Who is?

[aion-rsa]

Vikings Season 6 Episode 19 Review: The Lord Giveth . . .

https://ift.tt/2Moxiut

This Vikings review contains spoilers.

Vikings Season 6 Episode 19

“We all have a duty to preserve the old ways.”

Nearing the end of its six season run, the series penultimate episode “The Lord Giveth . . .” sets up a fascinating dynamic for the final chapter in Michael Hirst’s history based drama Vikings, but it’s the return of an old friend that brings an emotional close to an episode that otherwise finds warring sides in Wessex and Kattegat jockeying for position. Yes, Floki’s back and will hopefully have many stories to tell.

The cold open picks up where the previous episode leaves off, and we receive the hoped for result – the native tribe does its best to welcome Ubbe, Torvi, and the others despite the expected communication difficulties. Of course, we wonder whether these are the first Europeans with whom the tribe has made contact, but Hirst brilliantly sets the stage for the episode’s final reveal. While the exchange of gifts is a nice touch, it’s the watershed moment when Torvi hands baby Ragnar over to one of the Native American women that makes the most impact. These are clearly warriors, but interestingly, appear to be led by a woman which must provide some level of comfort for the shieldmaiden Torvi.

With all the chaos swirling around Wessex and Kattegat, it seems Ubbe and Torvi have finally found the peaceful life they seek, and though there will clearly be obstacles, who better to help them navigate choppy waters than the pre-eminent boat builder Floki. But before learning of his existence here, we’re treated to a wonderful scene as the men share weapons and skills. Though no one makes mention of it initially, Ubbe recognizes certain Norwegian words and phrases that can only mean this group has made previous contact. That said, once we hear the words “crazy man” to describe the source of this language, the realization that Floki may be alive suddenly becomes possible.

Hirst does insert an element of potential conflict when we witness one of the Vikings insist that one of the young native men show him where gold can be found. Once a Viking always a Viking, at least for this guy. Still, it sets the stage for potential conflict between the two groups who have made it clear they’re willing to live together in peace. With the experiences of Iceland and Greenland behind them, hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, and Floki can provide a link between the two cultures as well as one to the man ultimately responsible for this moment, Ragnar Lothbrok.

Read more

TV

Vikings Season 6 Episode 16 Review: The Final Straw

By Dave Vitagliano

TV

Vikings Season 6 Episode 17 Review: The Raft of Medusa

By Dave Vitagliano

Turning our attention to Kattegat, it’s difficult to criticize Ingrid’s actions here as she sets out to fill the power void King Harald leaves behind when he goes to war in Wessex. Her actions are no more or less reprensible than those carried out by the other earls, lords, and kings, but because she’s a woman, a different standard applies. That she’s also a powerful witch obviously plays a role here, but like Floki, it’s her devotion to preserving their religion in the face of encroaching Christianity that sets her apart. Ingrid tells Erik she’s dispatched assassins to take out a neighboring king who has converted to Christianity, an obvious precursor to his later ploy to remove her from the equation. Still, it’s this sincere devotion to the gods that keeps us in her corner despite the moral challenges she confronts.

We don’t for a second believe that Erik’s slave will successfully carry out the assassination of Ingrid, and when his wife affirms that “we’ll do it together,” the scene that follows assures us that this mission will fail. Poison? Stabbing? They come across as the amateurs that they are, but the final twist cements Ingrid’s grasp of the crown that becomes available upon Harald’s death on the battlefield. Ingrid makes a show of the slave’s death, but it’s the wife’s pitchfork to Erik’s chest that provides the most satisfaction. So much for marital loyalty.

While Ingrid’s hold on Kattegat’s crown remains in its early stages, Alfred must now face off against Ivar and the Viking hoard if he hopes to save Wessex from being overrun once and for all. Religious imagery appears to great effect throughout, and as the men march into position, the large wooden cross they carry topples over issuing a portent of doom in the battle to come. However, it’s the fog and mist that symbolically obscure the battlefield, preventing both the audience and the participants from seeing the inherent truths of this conflict. While it appears Ivar holds an advantage as the armies regroup, that’s far from a sure thing.

As usually occurs when Ivar takes an army into battle, the intricacies of the plan speak to his strategic acumen, but here his success depends on Alfred acting like the Alfred he knew as a child, one unwilling to make sacrifices. The nine minute battle sequence, long even by Vikings standards, doesn’t bring us anything new, but does contain several pivotal incidents within the greater whole. Elsewith’s confidence in her husband flags as the conflict gets underway, and while she makes solid points, when Alfred takes a sword to the shoulder, his two-fold reaction sets a path for the battle’s next stage.

Hirst makes a point of accentuating Alfred’s physical limitations, so when he removes the sword from his shoulder and stands tall amidst the chaos, we see a young king take a bold step toward greatness. Nevertheless, it’s what happens next that dramatically changes the tenor of the battle. To this point in the series, the supernatural has found its footing on the Viking side of the narrative, but as he stands gravely wounded on the battlefield, Alfred glimpses the powerful image of a crucified Christ and takes it as a sign from God that they will vanquish their Norse foe. Whereas Ivar makes his decisions more intellectually, Alfred goes on his instincts, and rather than make the wiser decision to retreat and regroup, he orders his men to charge. It’s a bold move whose success is still to be determined, but this is not the same man who began the day listening to his wife’s admonitions.

While one king forges ahead, Harald finally gets what he’s wanted for some time now. Narrative tropes sustain themselves either through lazy writing or the recognized ability to achieve continued success influencing the audience’s emotions. Harald has dropped hints that he’s ready to join his brother in Valhalla, and when he’s seemingly killed by one of Alfred’s officers, his vision of Halfdan gives the brothers a chance to finally reconcile through death. Some genre television fans refer to it as the “Prince Oberyn Blunder,” and its effectiveness depends on our connections to the characters involved. Here, its use falls a bit flat. We neither love nor hate Harald at this point and have no investment in the Saxon soldier he ultimately kills. Still, when the Saxon taunts the fallen king, there is a sense of contentment when Harald’s last gasp centers on a dagger to the man’s throat.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

We’ve reached the end of the road with Vikings, and how much resolution we get in the series’ finale remains to be seen. If history is any indicator, fans of the show will be divided at its conclusion, but “The Lord Giveth . . .” sends us forward with mixed feelings. At the end of the day, Ubbe correctly notes “This is our story.” Whose god will prevail?

The post Vikings Season 6 Episode 19 Review: The Lord Giveth . . . appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[mylifeasavetstudent]

I just finished my first year of undergrad, and while I've shadowed at a vet clinic before, I'm about to start a job as a veterinary assistant. While I'm super excited, I'm also extremely nervous. Any advice for starting a first job at a vet clinic?

Ooh fun question! Congrats on finishing your first year and getting your first job as a vet assistant!

I volunteered/shadowed on and off from when I was 12-18, then got my first job as a part-time assistant at a general practice when I was 18-22, and now I’ve been working full-time as an assistant at an emergency hospital for the past year.

So much comes to mind, so this may be pretty long.

———-

-Be willing to learn! Accept that there is a lot you don’t know, and always be willing to listen and learn from more experienced people.

-Don’t be afraid to ask the doctors questions about cases. Most are more than willing to answer and explain. (Everyone there who is more experienced has been where you are now one day in their life - when you become an experienced person, remember what it was like to be a nervous, new assistant.)

-Don’t be afraid to ask the other assistants/techs for help. If you don’t know how to do something, it’s a million times better to ask than to guess and do something incorrectly. (Same goes for clarifying what you’re ALLOWED to do.)

-On the same note, if you don’t know how to do something, but want to learn, say so, or the experienced assistant/tech may just do it FOR you.

-Restraint. Start with the nice ones! If you’re not comfortable restraining an aggressive animal - SAY SO. Don’t be afraid to use muzzles, e-collars, comforters for big dogs or cat-muzzles, e-collars, towels for cats - they don’t hurt the animal and they help keep everyone safe. Despite what the owner believes, the dog CAN breathe through the muzzle (be careful with muzzles and vomiting patients though). Sometimes you can even distract patients with food (make sure they’re not on a special diet or NPO or anything). You can also pet their heads (if they’re not aggressive, just squirmy) or tap their heads gently with a pen (if they are aggressive) to distract them. If an animal is really stressing themselves out or has a high possibility of hurting you or someone else - tell the doctor. Medical restraint (drugs) is great! There are so many different ways to restrain animals of different sizes and temperaments for different procedures, that I don’t even know where to start. You’ll learn over time! Always be cautious. Even the nicest animals will bite when scared or in pain. Watch out for teeth and claws, but also those sneaky back feet and headbutts.

-Bring a notebook! Write down any questions you have (if it’s too busy to ask them) - you can look them up yourself, or ask them later. Write down things you learn, write down instructions on how to do something new, etc. (I actually looked back at my notebook from a year ago and had some fun reading my old questions).

-Bring snacks/drinks. My GP (general practice) shifts were 12 hours, my ECC (emergency and critical care) shifts are 11 hours. It’s a long day!

-Wear good shoes. When I started working, I wore converse sneakers and my god did my ankles hurt. It’s constant standing and walking - buy good walking sneakers!

-Everyone has their own way of doing things. If it’s something menial, take everyone’s methods into account and form your own way. If it’s something important, find a high ranking person (doctor, practice owner, head technician) and get it clarified which way YOU should do it.

-Try to keep busy! If you don’t know what to do, ask anyone if there’s anything you can do to help them. If not, you can always sweep/mop/clean. Your coworkers and employers will definitely take note of it.

-Check on patients. Maybe this comes from my emergency experience, but you can never check on patients too often! From something small like pee sitting in the cage, to a change in breathing patterns, you don’t want anything to go unnoticed for too long. If anything looks abnormal to you - ask for a second opinion.

-(May be targeted more toward Emergency.) Learn normal vitals. These are your first indicators of something going seriously wrong. Learn what a normal heart rate is for a small/medium/large dog and for a cat (and how it sounds!), learn a normal respiration rate, and normal gum color. Not as urgent - but temperature too. A change in vitals may be a normal occurrence of a disease process or side effect of medication, but always bring it up to the doctor just in case. Hopefully you’ve been around mostly healthy animals before shadowing, so learn what “breathing weird” looks like, and whether it’s increased effort (dyspnea) or increased rate (tachypnea)… or both. You hear about pale gums and cyanotic (blue/purple) gums a lot, but if you ever get to see them, take note of what they actually look like on a living patient. Mentation is important too - is that crazy energetic puppy suddenly only glancing over at you when you open the cage door? That cat who wanted to kill you an hour ago not even hissing when you disconnect his fluids?

-(May be targeted toward emergency). Triage. In the emergency room, we triage everything. In GP, we did not. Sometimes it’s obvious, like a patient hit by a car needs to be rushed straight back, and a puppy hopping around for a vaccine appointment does not. But if you get a chance to look around the waiting room, take a look at the patients. Take note of any abnormal breathing, mucous membrane color, a patient lying on its side (laterally recumbent) and not really reacting to its environment. Sometimes owners don’t realize how serious of an emergency they have. It’s important to pick out the important pieces of information from what owners tell you. You’ll learn how to ask the right questions.

-Double check your math. If your doctor gives you medication doses in milligrams, you’ll have to convert them to milliliters. Even if you’re just filling oral meds in the pharmacy, you may need to figure out how many tablets equates to the right number of milligrams. Double check your math. Triple check your math. Ask someone else to check it. Check it until you’re confident. (Soon you’ll get an idea of “that seems like a really high dose”, is it written correctly?)

-Be clear. Working around other people who know a lot about animals and medicine gives us a skewed perspective. Don’t assume every owner knows something that’s “common sense” to you. Be very clear with explanations or medication instructions. 

-Label everything! If you have a pill just sitting somewhere, that’s extremely dangerous. Always write the type of medication, the dose, and the patient name. If an owner drops off treats for their pet in the hospital - label it! If you have a pet temporarily in a cage, write his name (you definitely don’t want patients getting mixed up and getting the wrong treatments). Label everything!

-Always keep a record, write things down. When the doctor asks you 8 hours later what diet you fed a specific patient this morning when there’s 20 other in-patients, you’ll be glad you did!

-Be nice to clients. People are frustrating, some people are very rude, but get used to your “customer service” persona!

-If you don’t have qualifications, be careful answering client questions. Depending on the rules of your practice, you may not be allowed to answer certain questions unless you’re a doctor. Unless the doctor explicitly tells you that you can tell an owner something, always tell the client that you will have the doctor come right in to talk with them. Unless it’s a straightforward question like, “Has he vomited today?”. (I’m talking about questions like: “When are we gonna decrease his medication?” “When can he come home from the hospital?” “Do you think he’s gonna live?” “Have his kidneys gotten worse?”)

-Learn how the front desk works! Just because you’re working as an assistant in the back doesn’t mean you should be confined back there. In my first job, the front desk was completely separate from the back treatment area, and none of the assistants knew how to work the front desk. Sometimes it’s busy or you need to cover someone for lunch, and you should learn how to check someone out, book an appointment, answer a phone call. It’s very helpful to understanding how the practice works as a whole. 

-Clean up after yourself. If you make a mess, don’t leave it for someone else to clean up - this is a good way to annoy coworkers, haha. Of course, this isn’t always doable. Sometimes it gets busy, and everything turns into a mess at once.

-Respect the dead. Everyone in the medical field gets calloused to death/euthanasia because we have to. As sad as it is, sometimes euthanasia really is the best option for a suffering animal. We see death so often that letting every death tear us apart emotionally would be unsustainable. (Ever see that Scrubs episode where they talk about a patient dying, and how his whole family is taking the day off, but all the doctors have to move right on to the next patient a minute later? They say how they make jokes because it’s the only way to cope.)All that aside, have some respect for the patients. It’s okay to be emotionally calloused, but don’t be disrespectful. Don’t throw patients into body bags. Remember that this was someone’s best friend for a number of years. Treat them how you would want your deceased pet to be treated. 

-That’s a good overall rule. Treat your patients how you would want your own pet to be treated in a hospital. 

-Shadowing is a lot different than working. I’ve heard stories of people who graduate veterinary school, and all their experience is shadowing. They’ve never worked as an assistant or a technician, and when they handle their first patient, it’s clear they’ve never restrained a fractious cat. When shadowing, you just kind of stand there and watch. Your whole purpose for being there is to watch and learn - so you get to see all the “cool” cases and procedures and ask questions whenever. When you’re working, you may miss a “cool case” because you’re busy restraining the dog with an ear infection. But you learn what it’s REALLY like to work in an animal hospital on a daily basis - your future career! And it taught me a huge amount. A recent veterinary graduate told me that having all this experience working will help me immensely in veterinary school. Instead of just learning the concept of a disease in school, you’ll be able to relate it to that patient who HAD the disease and what the symptoms actually looked like.

——-

Good luck! 

[redantsunderneath]

Critical Accommodation

The first forum thread I ever started, on some televisionwithoutpity-type forum, was on the topic of simultaneously overrated and underrated art/artists.  Now, I don’t know if I expressed my ideas clearly or not, but in the email exchange subsequent to a strangely angry moderator deleting the post, clarity didn’t seem to be the issue as much as a failure on his part to admit to the idea that the relationship between quality and popularity could somehow be multivalent.  At the time, I probably used Radiohead or something as an example – underrated by any sort of mass audience but overrated by what you might a few years later have call pitcthforkers – but maybe Serial is a good modern equivalent.  I doesn’t hold enough interest for anyone who has seen more than 3 Datelines and thinks the idea of NPRing the concept up is boring, but elicits a little too much ado from the Slate reading contingent who, maybe, believe True Crime as a genre just got invented.

 I kind of lost interest in this as a concept as, after a while, all you can see are the social signaling aspects of this multi-audience interaction, maybe thanks to hipsters turning countersignaling into a game of chicken where they threw their steering wheel out the window. But it seems that multiple axes of “is it good” that coexist have become more obvious lately, and not just because people are starting to notice that everyone lives in a bubble. Case in point: I was involved in an exchange recently about the movie Suicide Squad, with a poster claiming that the response to the movie showed how pronounced the divide was between critics and the casual audience.  I had to ask what this meant because the critics I pay attention to have been very positive about Suicide Squad and the DC movies in general (in relation to the Marvel movies especially) and dismissive of the sea of internet opinions that call the films garbage.  The person bringing it up was talking about the actual moviegoing audience which made the movie immensely profitable because they weren’t told they were supposed to hate it vs. the majority of internet based and payed critics who poo-pooed the movie as you would expect.  Both of these critical-mass divides were true at the same time, but each of us preferentially saw one.

 I’ve written a lot about textual story and subliminal story in an effort to pick at the meaning of entertainments of all kinds.  But all this is making me think about the fact that there are more levels than just above and below and various audiences are habituated to look for satisfaction at a certain level. One problem is that no matter how smart and attentive the audience member is, they tend to privilege this one layer and, as a result, this strata is optimized for by producers (via a complex Darwinian system) if they are viewed as the primary audience.  So the actual most complicated and interesting multilayered stuff is going to suffer for any specific audience in that it will not be “the best possible thing” at the level they are trained to value the most.  The funny thing is, this system more and more doesn’t favor people who focus on depth and complexity in producing a serious work, but artists who are profoundly unhinged at some level who are willing to operate at the most superficial levels primarily with the deep stuff inadvertently spilling out like piñata guts.  These movies often don’t make intellectual sense.

 I think in order to consider this, text and subliminal aren’t going to cut it.  There is a superficial or visceral level of engagement – incident, big emotion… the action movie thing, but also at a different pitch the romantic comedy thing.  Crowd pleasers that satisfy the lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid – oral (safety, threat, need, good/bad) and anal (dominance, desire, will).  Then you have the mid level engagement of the genital (intricacy, complex relational, intellectual satisfaction) and basic social consciousness (mid to upper Maslow) which is common internet aesthete and print critic land.  If there is talk of screenplay structure or complex characters or representation, it is in this middlebrow-that-thinks-it’s-highbrow area. The Oscar zone.  

 There is another level, though, which me might call the ineffable, the preconscious, the deep structural, the semiotic, the transcendent, or the sublime.  People who I usually pay attention to are focused on this later level to some degree. The thing that ties these people together is an emphasis on visual storytelling (or poetics if we are talking about print) and a philosophical bent.  The escape of conscious forms, of spoken language and structure, receiving symbolic content and using that to construct meaning.  There is a lot of theory in this zone… it is not not intellectual, but rather senses something hidden or unintentional and wrestles that into the zone of language and reason.  This includes primal unexamined societal impulses where the motivations for politics and hatred lie.  

 So group 1 are the conscious experiencers (popcorn moviegoer).  Group 2 are the social intellectualizers (the maven or critic).  Group 3 have found some way to touch an unmediated submerged experience and bring it up to examine, which oddly gives them more in common with group 1 (the dredgers and deep divers).  Everybody at a higher number level has some experience with the lower numbers but what I have noticed is that most people in this hierarchy tend to limit focus to their preferred layer and stick there, losing the ability to really engage at the other levels with something that doesn’t satisfy on theirs.  I do run into more people who are able to put a foot on 1 and a foot on 3, people who go deep on trash cinema for instance, but these people usually take a shit on level 2.  Many of these people hate prestige TV very viscerally.  Others stick to 3 and tend to close read based on one particular “deep topic” like capitalism or gender.

 This leads to extremely insightful people who have a fixed level of focus.  I almost said “myopia” but a better ophthalmologic analogy is loss of lens accommodation, a common problem of age (the need for reading glasses after you turn 47 is this).  With this condition you can be nearsighted or farsighted or have 20/20, but you can’t focus very well outside of a narrow range of your focal length.  My very favorite writers on narrative art are able to focus up and down the scale and, importantly, experience the piece as a blank slate, so the reading can be guided by the piece and not a bias as to level of engagement.  Zizek is great, but I’d prefer it if he seemed to be able to be exhilarated, have fun, recognize bad pacing, or appreciate an actor/actress performance without making these a function of some Marxist/Lacanian equation.

 The good reviews of Batman vs. Superman I have seen dwell on the visual composition and fuck off attitude, but also focus on the movie as a critique of a kind of moral simplicity implicit in nerd/internet culture who can’t see what these characters are really up to.  The film is deliberately provoking the group that generates all the reviews.  Superman is an alien who is hyper aware of the conflict between humanity’s potential and its reality. His choice to act for the good in Man of Steel is that of a god in absolute agony as he has to take the war into himself, killing because moral choices are horrific and don’t have the external consequences they should in a just universe. Superman knows he chooses his path to suffer and serve the good and the universe could care less (Nietzsche’s Ubermench, anyone?). His suffering imposes a moral order on the universe.  In BvS he confronts the prospect of progressive inaction, the Obama path, do no harm because everyone seems to want you to be blamed, shamed into will-less-ness… one of the failure modes of the current American (masculine) spirit. Batman represents the other failure mode, the wallowing in the anger at traditional American values violated by the rise of selfishness and me first mentality.  Of course they need to fight – they are primal opposites: deflated optimism vs. pessimism on steroids, past vs. future, sun vs. void, naturally gifted immigrant vs. driven legacy born on third base.  

 These are gods, and are presented like gods, in a series of mise-en-scene straight ripped from renaissance paintings. It is wrong to speak of subtlety, because subtlety is the opposite of the point.  Look at those (Turin?) horses, gaudy symbols like oranges in the Godfather! The structure of the story is a mess by normal metrics, but there is a shape there, and that is enough when you are dealing with art film rules.  The collision of two celestial objects, awaiting the feminine to mediate their Hegelian synthesis and convert their masculine valances to the positive.  Dwelling on act structure is stupid.  Recognizing that they failed to make this a conventional narrative is useless.  Citing plot inconsistencies, “X wouldn’t do that,” and calling it emptyheaded and over the top mean you are watching a movie you can’t handle.  This is a skilled, smart but “off,” bodily centered outsider artist grappling with shit that is really, really big and deep.  It isn’t perfect, but no one should want that out of this (there are countless clockwork left brain things to watch)… you should come to this wanting a mess, gods of ideas punching your midbrain, opening you to experience the catharsis of basic archetypal struggles in the world.  You know, like superheroes work.  It is wrong to privilege level 2 which, remember, is where mass of expressed “learned” opinion is.  This is where the DC Verse lives.  Marvel is centered in DC’s hole, and it is right to talk of story as structure.

 My point is that the best thing you can do is learn to focus where the thing is most ready to connect with you and be flexible enough to let the thing tell you how to read it.  There is a lot of crap, but there is a lot of good stuff that gets critically ignored because too few are focusing in the right areas.  If you like more stuff, if you find everything more interesting and complex, you win. Not everything is good, but you can almost always find a way to engage it at its best.  You can say many bad things about the book Twilight, but damn if there isn’t something there about the subject/object struggle of being desired as a young woman, the disconnect of inner and outer experience, and the consideration of the choice of traditional-relationship-as-road-to-marriage in a modern context.  If you smirk and say Mary Sue, you have failed.  

 This three cluster model isn’t perfect, but explains a lot why I see lumpy, weird high budget stuff with the high viewership (mass audience), pissed off forums and think pieces (critical consensus/perceived audience if you live online), and elated jaded curmudgeons (deep critics) troika so often.  I think this is more than just a status economy (though that is clearly involved) but the production system has adjusted so that the qualities of the output levels align to the audience expectations.  The most interesting stuff is that which crosses levels, which requires risking a product that will probably seem suboptimal to everyone.  So, let’s have a toast for the auteurs who don’t fit, making movies that are a scrum of potential meanings that require you to get dirty and renounce the tyranny of “the way it should be done.” And I mean Michael Bay as well as David Lynch.  If they seem insane, it’s a feature not a bug.

[starseedsrise]

“Tesla vs. Einstein: The Ether & the Birth of the New Physics”

[stripedigital]

What Is Social Media Marketing?

  Social media marketing is one the best ways to market your business online. But interestingly enough, most people don’t know what this actually means. In order to keep up with consumers, it’s important to know what social media marketing is, why it’s important for your small business, and how you can carry out a successful campaign.

  What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is the process of promoting your business to potential customers through social media platforms. There are two main forms of social media marketing: social media management and social media advertising. There is some overlap between these methods, but each focuses on different objectives. As a business owner, it is important that you understand the difference between each of them. So let’s take a closer look at each:

1. Social Media Management

Social media management is the process of creating, publishing, promoting, and managing content across social media channels. This is a foundational component of social media marketing, and the process involves setting up social media accounts and posting relevant content to your pages. The goal of this function is to reach your target audience and build trust through posting engaging content.

When you think of social media platforms and the look or feel each individual account has, this reflects how the page was managed. This strategy is what helps users personalize their online experience, as well as stand out from others. And when you’re running a small business, it’s even more important to make sure that your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other digital channels are all helping you generate more business.

The idea is that, over time, the people who frequently engage with your content are more likely to do business with you. Engagement represents positive reactions that people have when they see your brand, and at high frequencies, it builds undeniable trust in your business.

2. Social Media Advertising

The other major component of social media marketing is social media advertising.

Social media advertising is the process of advertising on social media platforms to direct traffic to an external destination, like your website. These ads often appear as promoted posts on whatever platform feed you’re looking through. For example, Twitter ads appear as Promoted Tweets and on Facebook or Instagram they appear as Sponsored Posts.

But regardless of the platform you’re using, social media advertising allows you to reach virtually anyone and gain immediate exposure.

  Why Is Social Media Marketing Important For Your Business?

So now that we’ve defined social media advertising, you may be wondering – What’s the point of this? Why is this important for me?

The simple truth is that your customers are on social media every single day, and these platforms are not going away anytime soon. Consumer behavior has been greatly impacted by the internet, especially through social media’s ease of accessibility. It’s important that you adapt to this new normal of marketing, because you may find your business on the decline, or even worse, out of business.

But the good news is you can leverage social media marketing to prevent this, as well as spark new growth in your business. Every business needs to use social media marketing if they want to stay in business, and yours is no different.

What Are The Benefits Of Social Media Marketing?

We’ve gone over why social media marketing is important, but let’s discuss why this is worth the investment.

The reality is that social media is now too big to ignore. These sites have a huge influence on both consumers and their everyday lives. It’s not going anywhere any time soon, and if you don’t spend some time on it, your business can fall behind. The good news is that investing in social media marketing can reward you with a stronger business and more customers.

Still unsure if this is the right move for you? Let’s discuss four major benefits of social media marketing:

1. Your Customers Are On Social Media

While this one might seem obvious, we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of this! Social media has been adopted so widely that over 2 billion people are regularly active on it. And most of these people are spending 3-4 hours per day on it, meaning they are spending a large portion of their day scrolling through posts and ads that interest them.

Let’s do some quick math.

If we assume most people sleep 8 hours per day, leaving us with 16 hours of awake time, that means that people spend 25% of their awakened day on social media! And by the time their life is over, that could equate to over a quarter of their life spent on social media.

If your customers are spending that much of their time doing anything, you probably want to be around that thing, regardless of what it is.

Right now, that’s social media. And the sooner you focus on your social media efforts, the better your business will do.

2. It’s Inexpensive

Compared to traditional marketing methods, social media marketing has both a greater reach and a lower cost.

For example, you can spend 10 bucks on an Instagram Ad and reach over 1,000 people. Meanwhile 10 bucks in the traditional world won’t really get you anything.

The reason why social media is so inexpensive is because of the sheer volume of people using it and the lack of advertisers taking advantage of it. But this is changing everyday. More and more advertisers are using social media to grow their business, and as a result, advertising costs have been rising slightly over the last few years.

The sooner you start building your social media presence, the better. You can easily take advantage of the low costs and build up your brand now, instead of playing catch-up and paying too much later.

3. It’s Highly Targeted

Social media marketing isn’t just a new way of advertising, it’s an extremely useful strategy that can help you reach more qualified leads. Each major platform records a lot of data from their users, and this information makes their advertising better than most alternatives.

They know information such as what you like and dislike, if you’re married or single, where you work, what businesses you visited, what food you like, and so much more.

This data can help you target ads at those who are most likely to be interested in what you offer.

For example, let’s say you sell dog accessories. You can run an advertising campaign that targets adults over 25 years of age, that are women who are interested in dogs.

This level of precision is what makes social media marketing so unique. It allows brands to connect with people who are interested in things related to their products, and make their buying process a lot simpler.

4. Builds Trust

Consumers are more likely to engage with the accounts they trust, and that trust ultimately influences their purchasing process.

When done right, everything you do on social media has the power to build trust with your audience. Great content shows that your business is legitimate and that you understand your audience. Each platform acts as a space for you and your followers to engage with each other more directly, and this helps deepen their relationship with your brand.

So not only are you reaching a lot more people, you’re also creating an environment that nurtures leads into conversions.

How To Get Started With Social Media Marketing

Now that you see how beneficial social media marketing can be for your business, you may be ready to jump right in. But before you get into the nitty-gritty, you have to determine your overall goals and choose an overarching strategy to guide you in that direction.

Essentially, the first and biggest thing you need to think about when it comes to your business is what you want to get out of your social media marketing efforts. To figure out which path is best for your business, think about the following questions:

-Do you want to build a brand on social media, or run an advertising campaign? -Do you want something that you can invest in for maximal returns in the future, or are you itching for leads and sales right now? -Do you value relationships and reputation, or do you want to bypass that and get straight to conversions?

Whatever you answer to these questions will ultimately determine your social media marketing strategy and influence your results. If you answered in favor of the first choices in each question, social media management is the best direction to go in. If you answered in favor of the second choices, then social media advertising will better fit your goals.

So how do these two paths actually differ? And how do you proceed in carrying out your marketing strategy? Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect from these two strategies.

1. Running An Advertising Campaign

When it comes to advertising, most people want the quickest route to success. If you want quick gratification, then a social media advertising strategy is likely best for you.

Short-term advertising provides immediate traffic to your website. It skips the process of obtaining new likes and followers, and thus saves you a lot of time.

The premise is simple. You want to drive a lot of traffic to your website. And if your advertising efforts are effective, then a portion of that traffic will convert from leads into sales.

There are several ways you can achieve this, including: -Appealing visual content (such as product photos and videos) -Remarketing techniques (like retargeted ads and follow-up emails) -Performance optimization (through metrics management)

Many businesses run their advertising this way, but it’s important that you know that there is underlying risk of this approach. Just like any marketing endeavor, your success is dependent on external factors, like advertising costs and competition that will impact your overall profitability.

It’s not a matter of “can this work”, it’s more so a matter of “will I be profitable when this works.” To be successful at advertising, you have to spend less to acquire a customer than the price of your products.

For example, if you spend $500 to acquire a customer that only pays you $100, you’re likely going to spend your way out of business.

And even if you are successful, with rising competition and ad costs, it may not be scalable for long. When that stops happening, your strategy is doomed.

To put it plainly, social media advertising is a great way to grow your business, but you should not rely on it long-term. It’s not scalable for anyone but the advertising giants, like Facebook or Google, themselves.

2. Building A Brand

Now, let’s discuss the alternative – building a brand.

Building a brand is invaluable. When your company is popular and trusted, you can eventually sell products and services without having to rely so much on advertising.

The downside to this, though, is that it takes a lot of time and work to build a brand on social media. You have to give enormous amounts of value to your audience so that they recognize you as a thought-leader and someone that they trust in your area of expertise.

But once that happens, they’ll listen to what you’re trying to sell them. When done correctly, your brand reputation will be an asset that you can leverage for the life of your business, not just for a single ad promotion.

In order to achieve this you need to set up well-designed social media profiles, post helpful content, and make sure that the people who are looking for related services can find your page.

  Now it’s up to you to decide which strategy is the best fit for your needs. While you can choose just one or the other, you can see even better results when you implement both. Building your brand on social media while also running campaigns can help you see quick results while you’re investing in long-term methods. You don’t have to limit yourself – you can truly see the best of both worlds.

  Conclusion

To put it simply, social media marketing can benefit your business greatly. Whether you want to focus on building your brand over time, or simply on generating quick conversions, you’ll be able to see real, measurable results.

Your customers are on social media right now, and it’s more important than ever to establish your brand on the platforms they use. As long as you determine which path is best for your goals and carry out high-quality marketing strategies, you’ll be able to strengthen your brand and increase sales.

And whether that’s through social media management, social media advertising, or even both, LYFE Marketing can help. Our marketing team can help you create effective content and ads that will bring in more customers to your business.

If you’re ready to get your social media marketing efforts started, then contact us today!

The post What Is Social Media Marketing? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog.

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[drink-n-watch]

Why does anime food always look so yummy? There you are, innocently sitting down to a few episodes after a long day at work and before you know it your drooling on your couch and wondering who will deliver okonomiyaki… I really lover Okonomiyaki. There’s a tiny little restaurant that makes awesome ones in Montreal but they don’t deliver here.

Ok super, I’m already hungry now and I’m about to get way way hungrier. These are five shows that had me wishing I could magically get invited to dinner in an anime:

5. Dream Festival R!

Super weird choice, I know! I even agree but hear me out on this one. Dream Festival R is the second season of a fluffy idol anime show or more precisely mobile game extended commercial. It has no particular reason to feature food at all and the first season didn’t have any memorable dishes. Although there was a running gag with one of the characters serving not quite edible food, the food was always illustrated in a very mundane way.

So going into the second season, I had zero reason to be anticipating mouth watering images and then bam! Well you see the screencaps above! This isn’t a show with a lot of food but the few depictions look so delicious and are so unexpected that I couldn’t help but add it to the list. This show honestly made me see if I could post mates some ramen.

4. Yuru Camp

Unfortunately I don’t have many Yuru Camp screencaps as my viewing of this show dates back to the dark days where I wasn’t taking my own. Still I quite clearly remember just how much food there was in the series. It was almost surreal how often scenes somewhat arbitrarily ended up revolving around cooking and eating.

I’m not a big fan of camping food and I’ve been a vegetarian for years so this is not exactly the type of foods that usually get my tummy growling but just from the sheer amount of food on the screen I think it earned a spot.

3. Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits

Food was a staple in this series and was often equated with love or caring as such the dishes were always shown with a certain amount of reverence. There certainly were a lot of them and enough variety to have a little something for everyone.

Although most of the recipes seemed down to earth, the fantastic setting makes me think they had access to ingredients which I wouldn’t be able to find in my local grocery store so that knocked it down a few pegs.

2. Isekai Izakaya

Not only did this show feature the most delicious looking Izakaya food AND tell me which alcohol to pair it with – a show after my own heart I tell you – but it also had honest to goodness real life cooking segments to teach how to prepare some of those dishes at home.

I spent a lot of time trying to convert to meals shown on Isekai Izakaya to local vegetarian ingredients, to mixed results. Still this show so perfectly conveyed the unique joy of eating a late night perfectly cooked piece of comfort food after some partying at a local pub. If you know what I mean.

Honorable mention

Food wars

There is absolutely no reason that Food Wars shouldn’t be on the list proper other than the fact that it just seems to obvious a choice… An anime that launched the love of cooking in fans all over the world!

1. Rokuhōdō Yotsuiro Biyori

All of my choices featured a lot of absolutely delicious looking dishes that are sure to tease anyone’s appetite but when in comes right down to it, Yotsuiro Biyori took the top spot as a matter of personal taste. The food featured throughout the show didn’t just look super tasty, it also had a lot of dishes I would order with minimum substitutions.

I adore macha desserts and I still dream of the macha chiffon cake in that series. Chiffon cake is a pain to make and I am the only person I know who likes macha so I can’t muster up the motivation to make it for myself. Instead, I have my screencaps to drool over.

There you go, are you hungry now? Have you tried any of these foods? Do you have an anime that always leaves you wanting to grab a bite?

Also, although chiffon cake is a bit of a hassle, millecrepe is actually kind of fun to put together. I recently tried this Just One Cookbook macha millecrepe version and it was delectable!

The Top 5 Animes That Made Me Want to Order Take Out Why does anime food always look so yummy? There you are, innocently sitting down to a few episodes after a long day at work and before you know it your drooling on your couch and wondering who will deliver okonomiyaki...

[asfeedin]

Motorola Tech3 Review: Hybrid Earbuds For The Plug-in Crowd

Motorola Tech3 review: Wireless earbuds without range anxiety

“A clever hybrid design takes them from wired to true wireless in seconds if you’re OK with average sound.”

Clever hybrid design

Well-designed cable management

Clear and accurate sound

Good battery life

IPX5 water resistance

Not enough bass

No volume control

Poor call quality when it’s noisy

Massive charging case

True wireless earbuds and electric cars have a surprising amount in common. Both offer unprecedented freedom: Electric cars free us from our reliance on oil, and true wireless earbuds free us from our reliance on wires. But both inventions also have inherent limitations: Electric cars have a maximum range that’s dictated by their battery capacities and the same is true for how long true wireless earbuds can deliver the tunes without stopping.

In both cases, the fear of running out of juice can be called range anxiety, provided you’re willing to equate miles driven with hours of playback. It’s this range anxiety that makes the $100 Motorola Tech3 true wireless earbuds so interesting. With a literal plug-in hybrid design that lets you convert them into a wired set of earbuds, they’re the perfect antidote to wireless range anxiety.

But do the benefits of the Tech3’s 3-in-1 design outweigh its disadvantages? Let’s take a closer look.

Wrap your head around this design

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

You can tell the Tech3 aren’t like other true wireless earbuds the moment you set eyes on their charging case. It looks like a really big black yo-yo. That’s in part because of its squat, cylindrical shape, but the comparison becomes almost unavoidable due to the two sets of braided cords that wrap around its midsection.

The braided cords don’t stretch or deform at all, snapping into their slots the same way every time. It just works.

Flip open the makeup-compact-style lid and you’ll find the earbuds neatly stowed in their own charging nooks. Flipping up a second smaller lid within the main compartment reveals the ends of one of those braided cords. This is the one you’ll use to physically connect the earbuds in their “sport loop” configuration.

The second cord — the one that magnetically attaches to the sport loop for wired use — is accessed from the bottom of the case. The arrangement reminds me of decades of attempts to neatly store wired earbuds by wrapping them around all kinds of objects. Those were almost always a total mess, but the Tech3 manages to bring order to the chaos thanks to one important difference: The braided cords don’t stretch or deform at all, which means they wrap around their case and snap into their respective slots the same way every time. It just works.

The only problem with this design is its size. Unlike most of today’s true wireless earbuds, you will not be able to comfortably pocket the Tech3’s case. Some folks may also be annoyed by the micro-USB charging port, a format that has all but disappeared from newer phones (including Motorola’s latest models, ironically). There is a charging indicator light on the front, but it’s tiny and very difficult to see.

Comfortable buds

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

When I first saw the press images of the Tech3, I feared that the ability to plug in the sport loop cord would mean big, bulky earbuds. Amazingly, the buds aren’t any bigger or heavier than non-hybrid models, and they’re actually smaller than some — Amazon’s Echo Buds are chunkier.

The plastic plugs on the ends of the cord create a barrier to how deeply you can insert the earbuds into your ears.

They’re also quite comfortable. I tend to have good luck with the default medium-sized ear tips on most earbuds and the Tech3 were no exception. I was able to get them nestled firmly yet comfortably in my ear and they stayed comfortable for several hours.

Despite the fact that you can plug in the sport loop without sacrificing size or comfort, there is a pretty major flaw in the design. The hard plastic plugs on the ends of the cord create a physical barrier to how deeply you can insert the earbuds into your ears. For me, this meant that the natural drag exerted by the cord over time had a tendency to loosen the buds.

There’s a reason virtually all neck-loop-based earbuds use some kind of ear-hook or ear-fin — you need to stabilize the earbuds against this tugging. Unfortunately, the Tech3 do not come with either built-in or the optional slip-on kind of ear fins you find on some models. This seems like an odd oversight for earbuds that are meant to be used tethered and during vigorous exercise. On the bright side, with IPX5 water resistance, they’ll be able to deal with the kind of sweat that vigorous exercise tends to produce.

Decent sound

At $100, the Motorola Tech3 are at the high end of the affordable side of the true wireless earbud market. Given its fancy hybrid design, you might expect that some sacrifices were made in the audio department, and this is true: They do not deliver the same audio quality as the similarly-priced 1More Stylish.

That said, they deliver very good clarity and precision, with a surprisingly neutral EQ. In this price range, earbuds tend to overcompensate on bass, or they fail to deliver a satisfyingly full midrange. The Tech3 don’t suffer from any of these drawbacks, making them one of the better choices for those who like their music presented with a minimum of sonic alteration. Vocals are especially well represented and even though bass-heads will find themselves wishing for more low-end oomph, most genres actually benefit from the Tech3’s sound signature.

Light on features

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

Another area where the Tech3 cut a few corners is their features. You get the standard set of controls: Play/pause, track skip forward/back, and call answer/end. You can also access your phone’s personal assistant or talk to Alexa if you install the free Verve Life app by Hubble. This app will also let you track the last known whereabouts of the earbuds should you lose them.

But there’s no volume control, no hear-through mode (sometimes known as transparency mode) to let outside sounds in, and there is no ear sensor so when you remove one or both buds, the music keeps playing instead of pausing automatically. And considering there’s a companion app, it’s a shame it doesn’t give you an equalizer feature, too. The controls themselves are quite responsive to taps, though as we’ve seen on other touch-sensitive earbuds, there are times when you inadvertently tap (and stop playback) or tap twice and the bud fails to register the second tap.

Not built for noise

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

Call quality with the Tech3 is a bit hit or miss. Overall voice quality is very good, but your callers won’t appreciate it if you’re in a busy environment.  There’s virtually no noise-canceling; a light breeze sounded like a wind storm, and a dog barking more than 50 feet away sounded like it was right next to me. It’s a subtle reminder that the Tech3 belongs to a portfolio of products that bear the Motorola brand but are not made by either Motorola Solutions (the original Motorola company) or by the Lenovo subsidiary that controls the mobile phone business. Instead, these earbuds are made under license from Lenovo by Binatone, a Hong Kong-based electronics manufacturer.

Good battery life

Rated for seven hours between charges, you might never need to use that plug-in cord.

Yes, the Tech3 have been designed to offer unlimited playtime via their hybrid design, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have decent battery life. Rated for seven hours between charges, I actually got more than 7.5 hours out of the right earbud, while the left gave up at just under seven hours.

Even their fast-charge feature is better than I’d expect, with three hours of playtime after 15 minutes. With only about 1.5 charges in the case (for a total of 18 hours) you might never need to use that plug-in cord.

Plug-in hybrid

Simon Cohen / Digital Trends

Using the two cords to go from fully wireless to fully wired only takes a few seconds. The trickiest part is lining up the triple-prong gold contacts on the ends of the sport loop with the corresponding ports on each earbud. There is a set of white markers to help, but it takes some precision, not to mention good eyesight.

An obvious issue with this arrangement is that those contacts could loosen over time, much like headphone jacks themselves tend to do. It’s a risk, for sure, but I can tell you that at least when new, the fit is tight and very secure. No amount of gentle tugging can budge them at all.

When connected via the magnetic headphone cable, the earbuds automatically power down, and they sound just as good if not better than when used in wireless mode.

Our take

The Motorola Tech3 concept provides a unique solution to a problem we’re not convinced a lot of people have: How to use your true wireless earbuds with a headphone jack. At $100, it’s not an expensive solution, but you’re forced to give up a lot to benefit from its flexibility.

Is there a better alternative?

If great sound matters to you and your budget can stretch a bit, you can actually get a very similar solution from the Shure Aonic 215. They aren’t as elegantly packaged as the Tech3 and have their own drawbacks, but they’re way more flexible.

If great sound matters to you but $100 is your limit, check out our list of the best cheap true wireless earbuds. None of them possess the Tech3’s clever hybrid trick, but many offer more features and better sound. Finally, if battery life is your biggest concern, for an additional $29, you can’t go wrong with Samsung’s amazing 11-hour $129 Galaxy Buds+.

How long will it last?

The construction of the Tech3 earbuds and their charging case is good, but not great. They’ll probably survive several years of use if you don’t abuse them. The two cables are very well made, but it’s impossible to tell how many times you’ll be able to plug them into the earbuds before that connection fails.

Should you buy it?

Unless you absolutely must have the ability to plug your true wireless earbuds into a phone or computer, or you live in constant fear of your battery dying, we think you should skip the Tech3. That said, if you do value their key feature, they’re not a bad set of true wireless earbuds.

Editors’ Recommendations

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Tags: Crowd, Earbuds, Hybrid, Motorola, Plugin, Review, Tech3

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[sciencespies]

Are 'dog years' for real? An explanation of calculating canine age

https://sciencespies.com/biology/are-dog-years-for-real-an-explanation-of-calculating-canine-age/

Are 'dog years' for real? An explanation of calculating canine age

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

If your dog has been alive and kicking its paws about for a decade, the widely held belief is that it has aged as much as a human would have done by the grand old age of 70. This conversion factor—each year of a dog’s life accounting for seven human years—comes from dividing human life expectancy of around 77 by the canine life expectancy of around 11.

The underlying assumption is that each calendar year a dog lives though is equivalent to seven human years at any stage of a dog’s life. But new research suggests that things aren’t so simple. And if we look at some basic developmental milestones, it’s clear why.

For example, most dog breeds reach sexual maturity between the ages of six and 12 months—the upper end of that range corresponding, by the traditional conversion, to a human age of seven. And at the other end of the spectrum, although unusual, some dogs have been known to live for over 20 years. Under the “factor-of-seven” conversion rule, this would equate to an unfathomable 140 human-equivalent years.

To make matters more complicated, dogs’ life expectancy depends significantly on the breed. Smaller dogs tend to live significantly longer, suggesting that they age more slowly than bigger dogs.

All of this raises the question of what exactly we mean by age. The most obvious way to describe it is simply the length of time that has passed since birth. This is known as the chronological definition of age.

However, there are other descriptions. “Biological age”, for example, is a more subjective definition, which relies on assessing physiological indicators to identify an indivdual’s development. These include measures like the “frailty index“—surveys which take into account an individual’s disease status, cognitive impairments and levels of activity.

Then there are the more objective ageing biomarkers, such as levels of gene expression (genes produce proteins at differing rates at different stages of life) or numbers of immune cells. The rate at which biological age increases depends on genetically inherited factors, mental health and lifestyle.

For example, if you’ve spent a lot of time eating junk food and smoking cigarettes instead of taking exercise and eating healthily, the chances are your biological age will exceed your chronological age. Or, you might be a 60-year-old with the body of a 40-year-old if you’ve looked after yourself well.

A new look at a dog’s life

When it comes to comparing animal ages across species, the biological definitions of age are far more useful than their chronological counterparts. Knowing a hamster is six weeks old doesn’t give you a good picture of that animal’s life stage even if you know the life expectancy of a hamster is only three years. Learning that a hamster has reached an age at which it can reproduce gives a much better picture of its level of maturity.

The authors of the new ageing study suggest that a sensible way to measure biological age is though so-called “epigenetic clocks”—changes to the packaging of our DNA that accumulate over time in all mammals.

In particular, “methylation”—the addition of methyl groups (a carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms) to DNA—seems to be a good indicator of age. Many prominent physiological markers, such as the development of teeth, seem to occur at the same levels of methylation across different species. So by matching the levels of methylation in Labrador retrievers and humans, the researchers derived a formula to map dog age to its human equivalent.

That formula is: human equivalent age = 16 x ln(dog’s chronological age) + 31.

Here “ln” represents a mathematical function known as the natural logarithm. The logarithm function is well-known in the non-linear scales for energy released during earthquakes (Richter) or for measuring sound (decibels). It comes in useful for measuring quantities whose sizes vary over many orders of magnitude. It’s even possible, as I explore in my new book The Maths of Life and Death, that a logarithmic experience of the passing of time might explain why we perceive time speeding up as we get older.

In the graph below, you can see how the natural logarithm works to convert the years a dog has lived (dog age) into the equivalent human age in the red dashed curve. The curve suggests that dogs mature extremely rapidly at first, but that their ageing then slows down, meaning that most of their lives are experienced as a form of protracted middle age.

A handy short cut is to remember that the first dog year counts for 31 human years. Then, every time the dog’s chronological age doubles after that, the number of equivalent human years increases by 11. So eight calendar years represents three “doublings” (from one to two, two to four and then four to eight) giving a dog age equivalent of 64 (that’s 31 + 3×11).

This useful approximation is plotted as the black curve on the conversion figure below. The green line represents the discredited factor-of-seven rule that suggests unrealistic ages at the higher end of the dog age spectrum.

Most dog lovers will already have suspected that the human-to-dog age relationship is non-linear, having noticed that, initially, their pets mature much more quickly than the linear factor-of-seven rule suggests.

A more sophisticated refinement to the factor-of-seven rules has suggested that each of the dog’s first two years correspond to 12 human years while all subsequent years count for four human equivalents. The blue curve in the above figure, which represents this ad hoc rule, shows better agreement with the new logarithmic law.

In practice the new molecular insights into human-to-dog age conversion encapsulated by the logarithmic law suggest that dogs move into middle age even more rapidly than most dog-owners would have suspected. It’s worth bearing in mind, when you find that Rex is reluctant to chase the ball like he once did, that he’s probably got more miles on the clock than you’ve been giving him credit for.

Explore further

How old is my pet in dog years or cat years? A veterinarian explains

More information: Tina Wang et al. Quantitative translation of dog-to-human aging by conserved remodeling of epigenetic networks, (2019). DOI: 10.1101/829192

Provided by The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Citation: Are ‘dog years’ for real? An explanation of calculating canine age (2019, November 29) retrieved 30 November 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-11-dog-years-real-explanation-canine.html

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#Biology

[aartisenblog]

  GET THIS BOOK

Author:

George W. Collins, II

Published in: Pearson Education Limited Release Year: 2003 ISBN: 978-0912-9-1813-6 Pages: 116 Edition: Internet Edition File Size: 2 MB File Type: pdf Language: English

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Description of Inorganic Chemistry

Not only might one comfortably ask “why one would write a book on this subject?”, but one might further wonder why anyone would resurrect it from the past. My reasons revolve around the original reasons for writing the monograph in the first place. I have always regarded the virial theorem is extremely powerful in understanding problems of stellar astrophysics, but I have also found it to be poorly understood by many who study the subject. While it is obvious that the theorem has not changed in the quarter-century that has passed since I first wrote the monograph, pressures on curricula have reduced the exposure of students to the theorem even below that of the mid 20th century. So it does not seem unreasonable that I make it available to any who might learn from it. I would only ask that should readers find it helpful in their research, that they make the proper attribution should they employ its contents. The original monograph was published by Pachart Press and had its origin in a time before modern word processors and so lacked many of the cosmetic niceties that can currently be generated. The equations were more difficult to read and sections difficult to emphasize. The format I chose then may seem a little archaic by today’s standards and the referencing methods rather different from contemporary journals. However, I have elected to stay close to the original style simply as a matter of choice. Because some of the derivations were complicated and tedious, I elected to defer them to a “notes” section at the end of each chapter. I have kept those notes in The Virial Theorem In Stellar Astrophysics edition but enlarged the type font so that they may be more easily followed. However, confusion arose in the main text between superscripts referring to references and entries in the notes sections. I have attempted to reduce that confusion by using italicized superscripts for referrals to the notes section. I have also added some references that appeared after the manuscript was originally prepared. These additions are in no way meant to be exhaustive or complete. It is hoped that they are helpful. I have also corrected numerous typographical errors that survived in the original monograph, but again, the job is likely to be incomplete. Finally, the index was converted from the Pachart Edition by means of a page comparison table. Since such a table has an inherent one-page error, the entries in the index could be off by a page. However, that should be close enough for the reader to find the appropriate reference. I have elected to keep the original notation even though the Einstein summation convention has become commonplace and the vector-dyadic representation is slipping from common use. The reason is partly sentimental and largely not wishing to invest the time required to convert the equations. For similar reasons I have decided not to re-write the text even though I suspect it could be more clearly rendered. To the extent, corrections have failed to be made or confusing text remains the fault is solely mine Lastly, I would like to thank John Martin and Charlie Knox who helped me through the vagaries of the soft- and hardware necessary to reclaim the word from the original. Continuing thanks is due A.G. Pacholczyk for permitting the use of the old Copyright to allow the work to appear on the Internet.

Content of Inorganic Chemistry

Introduction 1. A brief historical review 2. The nature of the theorem 3. The scope and structure of the book References Chapter I Development of the Virial Theorem 1. The basic equations of structure 2. The classical derivation of the Virial Theorem 3. Velocity dependent forces and the Virial Theorem 4. Continuum-Field representation of the Virial Theorem 5. The Ergodic Theorem and the Virial Theorem 6. Summary Notes to Chapter 1 References Chapter II Contemporary Aspects of the Virial Theorem 1. The Tensor Virial Theorem 2. Higher-Order Virial Equations 3. Special Relativity and the Virial Theorem 4. General Relativity and the Virial Theorem 5. Complications: Magnetic Fields, Internal Energy, and Rotation 6. Summary Notes to Chapter 2 References Chapter III The Variational Form of the Virial Theorem 1. Variations, Perturbations, and their implications for The Virial Theorem 2. Radial pulsations for self-gravitating systems: Stars 3. The influence of magnetic and rotational energy upon a pulsating system 4. Variational form of the surface terms 5. The Virial Theorem and stability 6. Summary Notes to Chapter 3 References Chapter IV Some Applications of the Virial Theorem 1. Pulsational stability of White Dwarfs 2. The Influence of Rotation and Magnetic Fields on the White Dwarf Gravitational Instability 3. Stability of Neutron Stars 4. Additional Topics and Final Thoughts Notes to Chapter 4 References Symbol Definitions and First Usage Index

[nbntv-blog]

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The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

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Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock – TechCrunch The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift.

[smartecky]

The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift. The results, on the other hand, were far more mixed.

If nothing else, the Fold has a remarkably high Q-Rating. Each person who saw me using the product had at least a vague idea of what it was all about. I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve had that reaction with a non-iPhone device. That’s great from brand perspective. It means a lot of people are curious and potentially open to the notion that the Samsung Galaxy Fold is the future.

Of course, it also means there are a lot of people looking on if you fail.

In some ways, this past week with the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been an extremely public beta. A handful of samples were given out to reviewers. Most worked fine (mine included), but at least three failed. It’s what we in the industry call a “PR nightmare.” Or at least it would be for most companies.

Samsung’s weathered larger storms — most notably with the Galaxy Note 7 a few years back. Of course, that device made it much further along, ultimately resulting in two large-scale recalls. The nature of the two issues was also vastly different. A malfunctioning screen doesn’t put the user at bodily risk like an exploding battery. The optics on these things don’t get much worse than having your smartphone banned from planes.

As of this writing, the Fold is still set to go on sale, most likely this year. To be perfectly frank, the April 26 release date seemed overly optimistic well before the first reports of malfunctioning units. It’s never a great sign when a device is announced in February and is only made available for review a few weeks ahead of launch. It’s kind of like when a studio doesn’t let reviewers watch a film before release. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but it’s something to keep an eye on.

That’s the thing. The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device you want badly to succeed. You want it to be great and you want Samsung to sell a billion because it’s a genuinely exciting product after a decade of phones that look mostly the same. There’s also the fact that Samsung has essentially been hyping this thing for eight years, since it debuted a flexible display at CES 2011.

In spite of that, however, the home stretch feels rushed. Samsung no doubt saw the writing on the wall, as companies like Huawei readied their own foldable. And while Royole beat the fold to market, Samsung still had a very good shot at the claim of first commercially viable foldable on the market, with a decade of Galaxy devices under its belt and hand-in-hand work with the Google team to create an Android UX that makes sense on a pair of very different screens.

[Source: iFixit]

But this iFixit teardown speaks volumes. “Alarmingly” isn’t the kind of word you want/expect to hear about a company like Samsung, but there it is, followed directly by “fragile” — itself repeated five times over the course of the write-up. iFixit’s findings match up pretty closely with Samsung’s own reports:

A fragile display means knocking it the wrong way can result in disaster.

A gap in the hinges allows dirt and other particles to wedge themselves between the folding mechanism and screen.

Don’t peel off the protective layer. I know it looks like you should, but this is probably the easiest way to wreck your $2,000 phone that doesn’t involve a firearm or blender.

What makes all of this doubly unfortunate is that Samsung has about as much experience as anyone making a rugged phone that works. I feel confident that the company will do just that in future generations, but unless the company can come back with definitive evidence that it’s overhauled the product ahead of launch, this is a difficult product to recommend.

Samsung knew the first-gen Galaxy Fold would be a hard sell, of course. The company was pretty transparent about the fact that the experimental form factor, coupled with the $1,980 price tag, meant the device will only appeal to a small segment of early adopters.

Even so, the company managed to sell out of preorders — though it didn’t say how large that initial run was. Nor are we sure how many users have canceled in the wake of this past week’s events. Certainly no one would blame them for doing so at this point.

But while the apocalyptic shit-posters among us will declare the death of the foldable before it was ever truly born, whatever doesn’t kill Samsung has only made it stronger. And this misfire could ultimately do that for both the company and the category, courtesy of its informal beta testing.

Rewind a mere week or so ago (seriously, it’s only been that long), when we finally got our hands on the Galaxy Fold. I was impressed. And I certainly wasn’t alone. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a glow that first time you see a device that’s seemingly been teased forever. The fact that it exists feels like a kind of victory in and of itself. But the Fold does an admirable job marrying Samsung’s hardware expertise with a new form factor. And more importantly, it’s real and works as advertised — well, mostly, at least.

The truth is, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with the Galaxy Fold. And indeed, it’s been fun chronicling it on a (nearly) daily basis. There are some things the form factor is great for — like looking at Google Maps or propping it up to watch YouTube videos on the elliptical machine at the gym. There are others when the bulky form factor left me wanting to go back to my regular old smartphone — but those trade-offs are to be expected.

I both like the Fold’s design and understand the criticism. Samsung’s done a good job maintaining the Galaxy line’s iconic design language. The foldable looks right at home alongside the S and Note. That said, the rounded backing adds some bulk to the product. And while open, the device is thinner than an iPhone, when folded, it’s more than double the thickness, owing to a gap between the displays. It’s quite skinny in this mode, however, so it should slip nicely into all but the tightest pants pockets.

In practice, the folding mechanism might be the most impressive part of the product. The inside features several interlocking gears that allow the product to open and shut with ease and let users interact with the device at various states of unfold. I found myself using the device with it open at a 90-degree angle quite a bit, resting in my hand like an open book. The Fold features a pair of magnets on its edges, which let you close it with a satisfying snap. It’s weirdly therapeutic.

Really, the biggest strike against the device from a purely aesthetic standpoint is that it’s not the Mate X. Announced by Huawei a few days after the Fold’s big unveil, the device takes a decidedly more minimalist approach to the category. It’s an elegant design that features less device and more screen, and, honestly, the kind of thing I don’t think most of us expected until at least the second-generation product.

The gulf between the two devices is especially apparent when it comes to the front screen. The front of the screen is around two-fifths bezel, leaving room for a 4.6-inch display with an awkward aspect ratio. The Mate X, meanwhile, features a 6.6-inch front-facing AND 6.4-inch rear-facing display (not to mention the larger eight-inch internal display to the Fold’s 7.3).

There’s reason to recommend the Fold over the Mate X, as well. I can’t speak to the difference in user experience, having only briefly interacted with the Huawei, but the price point is a biggie. The Mate X starts at an even more absurd $2,600, thanks in part to the fact that it will only be available in a 5G version, adding another layer of niche.

That price, mind you, is converted from euros, because 1) The product was announced at MWC in Barcelona and 2) U.S. availability is likely to be a nonstarter again, as the company continues to struggle with U.S. regulators.

Of course, the Fold’s U.S. availability is also in limbo at the moment, albeit for very different reasons.

I ultimately spent little time interacting with the front screen. It’s good for checking notifications and the like, but attempting to type on that skinny screen is close to impossible, with shades of the new Palm device, which implements its own shortcuts to get around those shortcomings. The inside, meanwhile, takes a butterfly keyboard approach, so you can type with both thumbs while holding it open like a book.

There’s also the issue of app optimization. A lot of this can be chalked up to an early version of a first-gen device. But as with every new device, the equation of how much developer time to invest is largely dependent on product adoption. If the Fold and future Fold’s aren’t a success, developers are going to be far less inclined to invest the hours.

This is most painfully obvious when it comes to App Continuity, one of the device’s primary selling points from a software perspective. When working as advertised, it makes a compelling case for the dual screens. Open something on the front and expand your canvas by unfolding the device. Google is among the companies that worked directly with Samsung to optimize apps this way, and it’s particularly handy with Maps. I used it a fair amount on my trip last week to Berkeley (shout out to the fine people at Pegasus Books on Shattuck).

When an app isn’t optimized, Samsung compels you to restart it, or else you get a nasty case of letterbox bars that retain the aspect ratio of the front screen. Continuity isn’t designed to work the other way, either — opening something on the large screen and then transferring to the front. That’s a bit trickier, as shutting the phone is designed to offer a kind of finality to that session, like hitting the power button to put the device to sleep.

I get that, and like many other pieces here, it will be interesting to see how people utilize it. Aside from the obvious hardware concerns, much of the work on the second-generation device will center around learnings from how users interact with this model. I know I surprised myself when I ended up using the 7.3-inch screen to snap photos. It felt silly — like those people who bring iPads to photograph events. But it’s ultimately a much better viewfinder than that measly 4.6-incher.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg for the inside screen, of course. The size, which is somewhere between phablet and mini tablet, provides ample real estate that can still be held in one hand. It’s a great size for short videos. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube on this thing, though the speakers (a small series of holes on the upper and lower edges) leave a lot to be desired.

And the seam. I found myself uttering the phrase “it could be worse” a lot. Like so much of the general aesthetic (including the odd green-gold color of my Fold’s casing), it’s lighting-dependent. There are plenty of times when you don’t see it all, and other when the glare hits it and makes it look like a line right down the center.

I realized after snapping a couple of photos that it’s particularly apparent in many shots. That probably gives a false impression of its prominence. It sucks that there’s one at all, but it’s not a surprise, given the nature of the design. You mostly don’t notice it, until your finger swipes across it. And even then it’s subtle and totally not a dealbreaker, unlike, say, the massive gap that made the ZTE Axon M look like two phones pasted together.

I love the ability to stand the device up by having it open at a 90-degree angle, so I can watch videos while brushing my teeth. But this orientation blocks the bottom speakers, hampering the already iffy sound. Thankfully, your $1,980 will get you a pair of the excellent Galaxy Buds in box. It’s hard to imagine Apple bundling AirPods with the next iPhone, but I guess stranger things have happened, right?

Multi-Active Window is the other key software piece. It’s something that has been available on other Samsung devices and certainly makes sense here. Open an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a tray will open. From there, you can open up to three apps on the display. Once open, the windows feature a small tab at the top that lets you rearrange them.

It’s handy. I used it the most during those times I had a video playing on an exercise machine, so I didn’t have to close out of everything to check emails and Twitter. I’m a gym multi-tasker. I’m sorry, it’s just who I am now.

It worked quite well on the whole, courtesy of robust internals, including 12GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 855. The primary issue I ran into was how some of the apps maintained that half-screen format after I closed out and reopened. I’m sure some people will prefer that, and I’m honestly not sure what the ideal solution is there.

The Fold’s also got a beefy battery on board. Like Huawei’s, it’s split in two — one on either side of the fold. They work out to a beefy 4,380 mAh. That’s just slightly less than Huawei’s 4,500, but again, the Mate X is 5G by default — which means it’s going to burn through mAhs at a faster rate.

Ultimately, the Fold’s greatest strength is Samsung itself. I understand why you probably just did a double take there in the wake of the company’s latest hardware scandal, but the fact is that the company knows how to build phones. The Fold was very much built atop the foundation of the successful Galaxy line, even while it presents a curious little fork in the family tree.

That means a solid and well-thought-out user experience outside of the whole fold thing.

That list includes great cameras with excellent software features and clever tricks like the new Wireless PowerShare, which lets you fold up the phone and charge up those Galaxy Buds or another phone while it’s plugged in. For better or worse, it also includes Bixby. Our model was a European version that didn’t have the full version, but I think I’ve made my thoughts on the smart assistant pretty well known over the last couple of years.

The devoted Bixby button is very much here. And yes, I very much accidentally pressed it a whole bunch. The headphone jack, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent, which is no doubt a big driver behind the decision to include Galaxy Buds. The Fold is an anomaly in a number of ways, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this might finally represent the beginning of the end for the port on Samsung’s premium devices.

Also absent is the S Pen. The stylus began life on the Note line and has since branched out to other Samsung devices. I suspect the company would have had a tough time squeezing in space for it alongside the dual batteries, and maybe it’s saving something for future generations, but this does feel like the ideal screen size for that accessory.

I’m parting ways with the Fold this week, per Samsung’s instructions. Unlike other products, giving it up won’t feel that tough. There wasn’t a point in the past week when the Fold didn’t feel like overkill. There were, however, times when my iPhone XS screen felt downright tiny after switching back.

In many ways, the foldable phone still feels like the future, and the Fold feels like a stop along the way. There are a lot of first-gen issues that should be/should have been hammered out before mass producing this device. That said, there are certain aspects that can only really be figured out in real-world testing. Take the fact that Samsung subjected the device to 200,000 mechanical open and closes. That’s a lot, and probably more than the life of just about any of these devices, but people don’t open and close like machines. And when it comes to the screen, well, a little dirt is bound to get between the gears, both metaphorically and literally.

As I close this Galaxy Fold a final time, it seems safe to say that the device represents a potentially exciting future for a stagnant smartphone space. But that’s the thing about the future — it’s just not here yet.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/samsung-galaxy-fold-review-future-shock/

Samsung Galaxy Fold review: future shock The Galaxy Fold has been the most polarizing product I can recall having reviewed. Everyone who saw it wanted to play with the long-promised smartphone paradigm shift.