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darkzorua100 · 5 years

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In works of fiction, one of the hardest things to do isn’t so much as writing a solid story but trying to find a way to end it with a satisfying conclusion. It could be a happy, sad, or all of the above as long as it fits the story that you have building up to at this point. After all, this is the last thing your viewers are going to be seeing. The last big take away before they have to move on. What is going to be the legacy of this fiction? A ending can make or break a series after all. Just look at Yu-Gi-Oh ARC-V for example. Looking back at it, it was such a groundbreaking entry into the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise for being the first series to make all the Extra Deck Summoning Mechanics relevant to the story instead of pushing them off to the side for the newest one in Pendulum at the time. It was a huge nostalgia trip by paying homage to the past series that came before it from using their locations for the different dimensions to bringing back past characters, in a way anyway, to the forefront. There is just so much more I could say about that spin-off but to put it in a nutshell, ARC-V just did so much right at the time but of course we all can’t forget that damn ending. The way that ARC-V ended just left pretty much everyone who had watched it from the very beginning with such a sour taste in our mouths. I don’t think I need to explain why, anyone who has seen the final knows exactly what I’m talking about, but yeah, it goes to show that a finale leaves a lasting impression and is pretty much why, even to this day, a majority of people consider ARC-V to be the worst Yu-Gi-Oh series to date.

So with all that being said, how did Yu-Gi-Oh Vrains finale do? Was it able to wrap everything up into a perfect little package with a nice bow on top? Well honestly, the package itself was a freaking mess and a half but I will say the bow on top wasn’t half bad for what it was worth. We all knew with Vrains ending way to early compared to the previous series that things were going to be getting rushed at the end but I will say that even if things were rushed, and it wasn’t the most satisfying ending they could have given us, what they did give us still left me feeling fulfilled and with Vrains being the absolute train wreck that it was, at the end of the day, I’ll call that a win.

So let’s start off with the final part of the Playmaker vs Ai duel. These two really were just full on neck and neck that it literally came down to their aces (because yes, Decode Talker is Playmaker’s true ace monster of show) batting each other, once again like from the opening, with Yusaku only being able to pull out the win in the end because Ai wanted to make sure that he was going to be able to finish him off during his turn. If his greed didn’t get the best of him, he would have actually won. That is actually really crazy to think about. At one point, just before Playmaker summoned Accesscode Talker, I seriously thought he was going to summon a Link 8 since he had the total Link Rating on his field with his three monsters plus Darkfluid being a Link 5 but nope, he summoned basically his new combination of the six Ignises in the form of a Code Talker (which all seem to be model after an Ignis anyway). I mean how he was actually able to summon out Accesscode was kinda BS but that’s just normal BS when it comes to the final duels in a Yu-Gi-Oh final. I’m still questioning how in the actual world did Yusaku not deck himself out during this duel. Seriously just how many cards did this boy go through? Way to many from the looks of things.

Now let’s talk about Playmaker and Ai scenes. My god, those shouldn’t have hurt as much as they did. Just at the beginning when Yusaku was telling Ai about how the bonds between others were the things that created the future, not predetermined simulations, and how Ai just couldn’t understand it just hurt right off the bat because I can understand why Ai can’t think that way. Just like he told Yusaku, he is data. To find a situation to a problem is all he knows. To base something with nothing to support it makes no sense to him especially when he can’t chance it. He has seen the alternative and my god, Ai. We didn’t even see the full simulation play out (but what we did see is definitely getting censored in the dub no questions there) but I could already tell what exactly played out. If Dr. Kogami was right about anything, it is that it is inevitable for humanity not to turn against artificial intelligence out of fear that they would one day surpass humanity and try and take us over or just kill us on the spot. I think the future we saw in that simulation was just that with Yusaku trying to convince them that Ai was no danger to humanity and well....we all saw how well that ended. Honestly I lowkey wished we got to see more of that simulation just to see the moment that Ai snaps and murders anyone. Because lets face it, Yusaku literally is the only family that Ai had left at that point. If something happened to him, Ai was actually going to snap. And it wasn’t even if something terrible would happen to him. Yusaku is still human while Ai is an artificial intelligence. If nothing happened to him, Yusaku would have just aged over time and eventually pass away while Ai would always remain immortal which once again would probably lead to a snap. I honestly don’t blame Ai for picking the path that he did in the end. Even if Lightning never showed him the first simulation, I don’t think it would have been long before Ai would have put the pieces together and start doing his own simulations. Ai was just a goner since the moment he was created as a A.I. with free-will. As for his death scene, I almost did start crying because things shouldn’t have had to have ended this way. I don’t care what Yusaku said. You should have took the fusion deal, young man. It worked out pretty freaking well for Judai and Yubel. Heck, regardless how stupid it was, the Yuu Boys and the Bracelet Girls were all still their own individual people too. I don’t see how that would be any different for you two, especially considering that Ai came from you, Yusaku. I have a lot of feelings about this but I will say that the moments that really hurt for me was when Ai asked Yusaku if he was a good partner, to which Yusaku answered “yes”, and when Yusaku explained to Ai that his name meant “love”. I actually didn’t think they were going to explain the meaning of Ai’s name in the show but I’m so thankful that they did but damn, that freaking hurt! Also Aiballshipping is canon. I actually find it hilarious that Ai stole Yusaku from Ryoken at the last second XD

As for everyone else’s endings. As much as it is still the most convenient bullsh*t ever, I am happy that Jin was able to move on after freaking years of being tormented by his PTSD and by Lightning in season 2 and is now happily working with his brother at the hot dog truck just like Kusanagi always wanted. I’m glad that they are slowly starting to make up for all the time that they have lost together because of this one incident. Aoi seems to be doing okay but I won’t lie, I was bit salty that Miyu wasn’t with her when she was visiting the brothers since it seemed like the perfect opportunity for them to be together and to show that their friendship is still strong after all of these years. Like what the heck? If they are going to force this stupid storyline on us, at least commit to it damn it! It has been three months and wait? Is she still in the damn hospital? Like we literally don’t know what happened to Miyu after all of this and I just find that infuriating but what’s new there? Akira is now CEO of SOL Technologies and I’m kinda mixed on how to feel about this. I mean we all were expecting this since the very beginning but again it is one of those things like what happened to Queen? Vrains threw away the rest of the Chess Pieces long ago but Queen was still a character. I mean I like to think that Queen just up and give Akira the company out of fear of being attacked again by someone else in the future but it is still one of those things that you wished you knew what happened to her as to how Akira got this position. It seems that Vrains has continued to grow and expand during this three month time skip and I don’t know if it was intentional or not but all the connections make it look like The Arrival Cyberse @Ignister and if that truly was the case that was a really nice detail to add, Vrains. Emma and Kengo seemed to have teamed up as a brother and sister bounty hunter team in the network which is fitting. Go is back to being his entertainer self to please his younger fans. I’m planning on giving my full thoughts about Vrains sometime later this week hopefully so I’m get into more detail about him and everyone else there. The Knights of Hanoi are taking Takeru’s declaration to heart and are watching over Link Vrains from Ryoken’s freaking cruise ship apparently while Ryoken and Spectre are watching over everything inside of Link Vrains. Now that Vrains is over, I officially have to ask. Where the actual hell is Ryoken getting all of this money from? Correction, WHERE IS HE GETTING ALL OF THESE BOATS FROM?! Geez and I thought we as a fandom were the shippers. This boy has a freaking navy of them in hiding.

HOMURA TAKERU GOT HIMSELF A GIRLFRIEND! MY BOY IS GETTING LAID TONIGHT!

No but seriously, before they showed the duel disks and just them sitting on the bed, my brain went places. The dialogue did not help. Yes my brain is extremely dirty but that’s besides the point.

ENTRUSTSHIPPING IS CANON! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

I like to think that wherever Flame ended up in the A.I. afterlife, he is looking down at Takeru with a proud smile during this moment. I also just find it fun that since Kiku doesn’t have an avatar, if anyone knows her in real life sees her in Link Vrains with Soulburner, they are obviously going to put the pieces together real quick about who Soulburner actually is. I’m in just such amazement right now over this even though I had any idea that something like this was going to happen. During the closing interviews from the VAs, Kaji Yuuki made a comment about how we were going to be seeing Takeru getting “unmasked” during the finale and I just knew that something like this was going to happen and I was not disappointed at all. I’m sorry but I just have such a huge sh*t eating grin across my face because of this.

THIS IS AWESOME!!!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY ACTUALLY MADE THIS CANON!

How is it that Kiku, a freaking SIDE CHARACTER, ended up being my favorite female of Vrains? I don’t know, I’m just going to move on before I start freaking out again about these two being so freaking adorable.

I do like how Naoki, as soon as he saw these two, makes it his new goal to get himself a special someone of his own. I don’t know how that’s going to work out for him but hey good for him.

And as for Yusaku, the shows ends with him going on some kind of journey, leaving his final fate obscure which is pretty normal for a Yu-Gi-Oh series as they did the same in the past with Judai and Yusei. My guess he’s going around the network to try and find a way to bring back Ai and maybe the rest of the Ignis.

Speaking of which, the last scene we get of this series is that Ai is apparently alive. Maybe. Who actually knows. He could be in A.I. heaven for all we know but if that’s the case I feel they would have shown us a scene of him being greeted and welcomed by the rest of the Ignis but what we got of him instead was him in his eyeball form looking to be restored. Man Ai is literally like a cockroach and I am saying that in the nicest way possibly. He gets his data eaten by a dragon, tore to pieces by a Data Storm, destroyed by a powerful program, and even kills himself by his own hand and yet he still lives. I am very curious to know if anything is going to come from this reveal, such as if YGO 7 actually is a crossover series, or if this was just the writers giving us a break and letting us know that Ai is still alive and there is hope of him returning. I mean I’m happy he is alive, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like it would have just been fine keeping him dead with the rest of the Ignis. Because if he is still alive, won’t Ai just try and kill himself again? Seems kinda counterproductive but I digress.

So yeah, I very much enjoyed the final episode of Vrains. The series had a lot of problems, and I mean A LOT of them, but it had its shining moments, such as this. Like I said, I’m planning to go into more detail about my full thoughts about the series but when it comes to its ending, I think it delivered what it needed to. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you Yu-Gi-Oh Vrains. You were a freaking struggle to watch at times but you were a joy to have around all the same. I guess the best compliment I can give you is that you literally are Ai. You are insufferable at times but you had your charm that kept me coming back for more and I’m sad to see you go just like I was with Ai.

Now it is onto Yu-Gi-Oh 7th and who knows. If it actually is a crossover series, Vrains might just be back sooner then we expect. I hope so because I’m not ready to say goodbye to my meme-lord and my fire child and his new girlfriend yet! I don’t think it has fully hit me yet that Vrains is actually over and it is going to suck when next week comes around and there is just no more episodes.

#vrains #vrains spoilers #Thoughts #theories

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checkthemeaning · 3 years

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IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME

As a part of the Strategic Marketing Relationship Seminar course at George Brown College, we have been meeting with professionals each week. On June 8th we had a great chance to meet and exchange ideas with Nicole Hutzul who has a dynamic marketing background. It was insightful for us to experience that how important is to be in the “right place at right time”

Nicole started her presentation by explaining her background. She grew up in Berkeley, California and found herself in the Education field in her university years. She chose to study the program of elementary school teaching which she later describes as this was the choice of necessity because she thinks that she wasn’t comfortable with different areas such as math. After her graduation, she started her professional career as an educational counsellor. Later she continued counselling kids with disabilities and writing a curriculum for a local charity which is called Working Wardrobes. This charity was helping women get back to their work after staying in women’s shelters. Slowly she had been developing her networks with each of her jobs.

Nicole continued her career in staffing companies which later let her recruit herself in an internet startup. She describes this achievement as being in the “right place at right time”. At that time Nicole was selling ads to companies like Yahoo and Google before these companies became worldwide popular. One thing led to another and Nicole found herself in a company that does Search Engine Marketing. After giving birth to her second child relatively premature, Nicole realized that most of her female colleagues from web hosting company suffers from the same situation. With her colleagues, she decided to start up their own business. She became a VP of Sales and Marketing for Preemie Magazine and the premium online community. Unfortunately because of the economic recession, Nicole and other partners had to sell their assets and move on which brings the current stage her Nicole’s life.

Nicole moved to Canada in 2010. In Canada, she began to work in a company that does email marketing, again the right place at the right time the company sold to Salesforce so she had a chance to work in Salesforce for almost 2 years. Again, thanks to her networking skills in Salesforce, she found a job in Adobe. After more experiences she has gained, she ended up working in Yext which is a search experience platform. In this platform she explains, they take the data, structure it in a knowledge graph and send the data out to the digital ecosystem.

As Nicole goes more in-depth about how is email marketing works, she introduces us to AI and machine learning technology. She supported the point with her “underwear story” example and reinforce the importance of machine learning for a great customer experience. Pattern recognition is a must for machine learning Nicole says. She gave the Google example of how Google takes the data and each step we feed the data with our activities on the internet and then Google starts to recognize the pattern. So Nicole told us how important to have pattern recognition and related this example with her underwear story. If the underwear company was able to the pattern recognition, Nicole would be more satisfied with her future shopping offers.

“A strength is not what you are good at, and a weakness is not what you are bad at. A strength is an activity that strengthens you. It draws you in, it makes time fly by while you're doing it, and it makes you feel strong.” Later Nicole continued with the words of Marcus Buckingham. She introduced us to “Strength-Based Coaching” and wanted us to find our own strengths. At the end of the presentation, she wanted us to walk through 3 takeaways from the presentation; Focus on our strengths, the movement of strength focus is building momentum and the strength focus is everywhere.

I found lots of common points between myself and Nicole when she was presenting her career path. I also chose the subject I didn’t want to study in university. As Nicole did, I also changed this preference by attending different programs so that I’ll focus on Marketing, not on my bachelor’s studies which is Economics. I also take insights into Nicole’s career path. I started my career as a logistics and planning assistant, later continued in different places with different titles such as in NGOs as a project assistant, international companies as a marketing assistant etc. I agree with Nicole’s right place at the right time motto is crucial to make the right choices in our life. In this presentation, I took myself some key points that, whatever background or professional experience you had, it is not too late to find your path and do something you are interested in. Therefore, it was a very fruitful meeting to get not only the sector insights but also Nicole’s experience to find her way.

#marketing #SEM

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superlinguo · 7 years

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Linguistics jobs - Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

This month’s interview highlights the increasingly central role of human language in tech, and the important role that linguists can play in the current tech landscape. It’s also been a delight for me to interview Sasha Wilmoth, who I last caught up with when she was taking one of her final undergraduate classes at Melbourne Uni. This interview is also something slightly different, because Sasha is one of a growing number of ‘hybrid’ researchers - working across both the university and private sector. I’ll leave it to her to explain more!

What did you study at university?

I did a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics, and studied Mandarin and Swedish. I also squeezed in as many literature subjects as I could. Within linguistics, I became interested in the morphology and syntax of Australian Aboriginal languages – my honours thesis was on Murrinhpatha, which is a polysynthetic language spoken in the Northern Territory.

What is your job?

That’s a good question! I think most of my family and friends still don’t really understand what I do for a living.

My time has been split between two jobs this year: I’m a Linguistic Project Manager at a company called Appen, and a Research Assistant within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). I’ll just focus on my job at Appen, because it’s a bit further away from academia.

Basically, Appen provides all sorts of data for AI and machine learning, including for speech and language technology. In the Linguistic Services department, we make the specialised annotated data that’s used to train these systems, in whatever language our clients need (we’re up to something like 180 languages and dialects by now). This includes pronunciation lexicons, prosodic annotation, part-of-speech tagging, tokenisation, proofing tools, guidelines, and so on. There are also lots of linguists working in the Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation departments. My job encompasses the technical and linguistic bits, as well as the more typical project management things like planning, budgeting, and delegating tasks.

For example, for a pronunciation lexicon project, which is what I’ve largely been working on, I start by researching the grammar, phonology, orthography and dialects of the language. Based on this research, I figure out what our approach to phonemic transcription will be and come up with some technical tools to predict the pronunciation of the words based on the orthography. I manage a team of linguists around the world who are native speakers of that language, and they check that the pronunciations are correct. Then I do a bunch of quality checks according to what we know about the language and prepare the data for our clients. Recently, I’ve been working on Serbo-Croatian, Persian, and Mandarin projects – as you can imagine, each language presents completely different technical and linguistic challenges.

Appen is an industry partner with CoEDL, so another cool thing I get to do is collaborate with academic linguists and see if we can apply our own processes and problem-solving skills to their research projects.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

I’m happy to say that I apply my linguistics education at work every day: I solve linguistic puzzles and read grammars and write phonological rules and use ToBI (a way of transcribing intonation) and the International Phonetic Alphabet. I never managed to become a very fluent Mandarin speaker, but I use that knowledge for our Mandarin and Cantonese projects. I even do a bit of Swedish proof-reading here and there. I didn’t imagine this was possible when I chose this rather impractical combination of subjects.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I know some previous interviewees have said they wish they had been more aware of the (lack of) job prospects for linguists. I’m stubborn though, and I was determined to study what I was most interested in without taking into account career prospects. I’m really glad I made that choice (and had the privilege to do so), because there are actually more opportunities outside of academia than I thought. The future for linguists in industry is bright, as we’ll be using speech more and more to interface with our phones, cars, toasters, personal robot servants, etc.

Most linguistics students don’t end up working as linguists, so it’s wise to keep your options open. But if you’re motivated and can’t think of anything else you’d rather be doing, there are jobs out there – I wish I had known about them when I was at uni. It’s really important to seek out and take advantage of opportunities for students like summer research programs, internships, or volunteering with organisations like RNLD here in Melbourne. Get to know your lecturers and tutors and ask them what you can get involved in.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Just a note on working in tech: I don’t have a computer science background, and I’ve never been a big computer nerd. I’ve learned everything on the job, and it turns out I quite like computers after all. If you have the type of pattern-finding brain that linguists tend to have, chances are you might enjoy the technical side of things when it’s applied to something interesting. Developing some technical skills as a student can help you in many career paths, but it’s not an absolute necessity. If you’re looking for a place to start: regular expressions, bash, and Python are all very useful and relatively easy to learn.

Previously:

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Interview with a local radio Digital Managing Editor

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for more interviews

#linguistics #linguistics jobs #linguist jobs #careers #tumblinguists #lingblr #research assistant #work #tech #language tech #coding

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bentonpena · 3 years

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Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too

https://bit.ly/3mHQJfP Surprise – NVIDIA’s AI and graphics news today for big industry is relevant to artists, too https://bit.ly/3wIEvZ4

Even as NVIDIA has a keynote with simulated robots making the rounds of a BMW factory, some of the GPU giant’s latest brings industry- and enterprise-grade tools to artists, too. That also could prove relevant as the pandemic has folks looking for work.

Music and live visual work means one thing – stuff has to happen live. And so that makes these chips more interesting. It means that fundamentally what musicians and artists do, which is to work with materials live in time, now matches up with the way graphics (and AI) chips work. Since they’re crunching numbers faster, it means the ability to create “liquid” interfaces. (That was the concept interactive visionary and legend Joy Mountford introduced years ago in a talk we had together on the South by Southwest stage, and it’s stuck with me.)

Now, I won’t lie, some of this is awaiting GDC, the game dev event. That’s because when you don’t have a BMW factory-sized budget, the punk-style approach of gaming has a ton of appeal. (You can see a bunch of gamers complaining on YouTube actually, I think misunderstanding that this is not a gaming keynote and … that’s coming later and … NVIDIA has always had workstation customers. But we know gaming trolls are not the most reasonable folks and – I for one enjoy watching Mercedes Benz simulate the Autobahn. It’s the Kraftwerk in me. GTA: Normal German Life Simulator. The Edeka parking lot is off the chain.)

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But having listened to NVIDIA talk about their new offerings, I think there’s more here than just pro and enterprise applications and the usual workstation / gaming PC divide.

Follow along as there is a ton of geeky machine learning, metaverse, Omniverse, and 3D artistry stuff coming – https://gtc21.event.nvidia.com/

Omniverse

The big pillar here that impacts audiovisual creation is Omniverse. I wrote about this connected platform for collaboration and exchange of all things 3D, built on open tools like Pixar’s very own USD file format (also a subtle hint that y’all can make bank with this stuff):

This week, we get a lot of the questions answered about where NVIDIA was going strategically.

But yeah, if you’re wondering if this could allow audiovisual artists and musicians to connect to big-budget projects – at a time when even the shows you watch at night (Mandalorian, cough) are made with these tools? You bet.

First, the most exciting detail for me was a commitment that Omniverse for individuals and artists will always be free – meaning anyone can get at this platform. That also means that individual 3D artists and AV creators can play with big industry – so it’s a source of gigs.

Also, the Omniverse pricing is not astronomical for those “enterprise” use cases. A small team can buy into it at a per-seat license of $1800 a year, plus a $25,000 cost for a nucleus server. That’s within reach of interactive and design shops, and it seems NVIDIA may even work to adapt to those kinds of small use cases even beyond that.

Omniverse on a shoot? Yes.

I expect NVIDIA may even be underestimating the demand for those individuals – partly because as their tools and partner tools get massively more powerful and easier-to-use, it may not even take an entire team to do great work.

Now, the wait is on just for connectors. 3DS Max, Photoshop, Maya, Substance, and awesomely, Unreal Engine are all supported. But keep an eye out for Blender, Marvelous Designer, Solidworks, and Houdini for even more sign this is on.

It’s an open beta; keeping an eye on the convention is a chance to stay posted:

https://www.nvidia.com/omniverse/

And yes, yes Unreal:

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The new RTX stuff is here

It’s tough to mention anything to do with semiconductors right now, given the global shortage that’s on. But yeah, the new pro RTX architecture looks predictably insanely great, for anyone doing real-time visuals, rendering, graphics, and AI.

So, if you’re planning to make your proud reentry into music festivals in 2022 with that fully immersive 3D opera involving live artificial intelligence, you’ll want to go ahead and write these into the grant application.

Desktops get the A5000 and A4000. Laptops get A2000, A3000, A4000, and A5000.

“But how will I fit them in my case?” the tiny man wonders. “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And then he stares into one too long and a whole Kubrick dream sequence starts, alas.

Either way, you get all the new technology for tons of creative use. Also, even though there’s the mention of “pro,” these laptop chips fit in low-power, thin and light machines. You could wind up buying them in a reasonably inexpensive notebook computer and using it to run a live stream.

Even apart from all the utterly essential graphics applications, that’s good news for music, because the ongoing pandemic ripples are likely to disrupt at least some international travel for the foreseeable future. Oh yeah, and it also means thin-and-light PCs with NVIDIA architectures to compete with Apple’s own silicon solutions. (I wouldn’t write out Apple from possibly future pro interoperability with these architectures, too.)

Yep, laptops will have these – though keep an eye on the semiconductor shortage to see what’s shipping when, as it’s … a doozy, generally.

But the performance gains are huge – in short:

RT cores with up to 2X the previous generation’s throughput (for tracing your rays, shading your whatever, all that jazz)

Third-generation Tensor Cores, also up to 2X throughput (so you can make a HAL that might open the pod bay doors even before someone has to ask)

CUDA cores (2.5X FP32 throughput) for … everything (and possibly even some audio/music applications, but certainly anything that uses the word ‘render’ in it)

Assuming some pros are the right generation for this, so – “It will be mine. Oh yes.“

Specific to desktop:

Up to 24GB GPU memory (or even 48GB with a two-GPU NVLink rig)

Virtualization (tell the server admin)

PCIe Gen 4 (twice the previous bandwidth – yeah, you might want your actual data transfer to catch up with the chip specs above, so this is essential)

Specific to laptop:

Third-gen Max-Q – so it doesn’t sound like a you’re vacuuming the carpet any more (“whisper” quiet is the phrase you want)

Up to 16 GB GPU memory

Also specific to pretty high-end workstation laptops, the the NVIDIA T1200 and NVIDIA T600 refresh of the Turing architecture is out. (That either means something to you because you use multiple-application workflows, or nothing to you and is a cool name.)

I might note, too, that these don’t look quite like the specs of that Apple Silicon stuff – not at the M1 level. I think it’s safe to say that for now, these are different use cases. But I also wouldn’t worry about it, either – the general scene is that working with 3D, video, AI, and streaming all get substantially easier in 2021 industry-wide, once chips get out there.

I also can imagine making an investment this year that lasts a good while, which is what happens when you do make a generational leap.

AI on the cloud

Without going into too much detail (I’ll leave that to NV), there is also a bunch of news this week for delivering GPU acceleration and (crucially for servers) AI computation via the cloud. There are a lot of “cool demo!” capabilities – machine translation, speech recognition, face recognition, eye contact, and live video processing continue to evolve through machine learning techniques from NVIDIA. (Yes, that also means more uncanny valley stuff and questions about the fabric of society, surveillance, and reality.)

But it means the ability to do stuff with big volumes of data, and in a way that doesn’t actually require you to be a huge enterprise to use.

This also deals with science – meaning artists who do understand machine learning now can make these topics relatable to the public. That’s potentially important, as we live in a world that demands more scientific understanding. (NVIDIA included an AstraZeneca chemistry example – and suddenly our lives are all revolving around that chemistry.)

I’ve been critical of some of the very examples NVIDIA uses here – like Spotify making playlist personalization more “efficient.” That’s nothing new – automating music based on trends and profit is basically as old as the music industry. But to really be able to criticize these things, I think it matters that musicians can understand, re-engineer, explain, and advocate with a solid grounding in the science and technology behind the topic. In the case of music, it’s now more complex to talk about the impact of playlists when they’re AI-driven than when you could point to something as intuitive as “payola.”

But science? Yeah, you can do genome analysis on your laptop.

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And they continue to advance the state of the art in machine learning – even with smaller data sets:

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Watch this space

I realize this was a very niche look at this stuff and will cause anyone not familiar with the area to have their eyes glaze over.

But AI + graphics + 3D + collaboration capabilities will pour into more recognizable use cases soon, powered by this tech.

And watch this space for what this might mean for artists, musicians, and creativity using tools like Unreal. Because there is no question in my mind that Unreal and Blender might well be mentioned in the same breath as Ableton Live and a Eurorack rig more frequently in the coming months and years.

But hey, at the very least, maybe tonight you’ll dream about standing on top of a surrealist skyscraper, gazing up at a King Kong-sized graphics card, and shouting at it “when are you shipping? why do these crypto people keep buying you? I just want to play some video games!“

Giant video card is listening. (Cue 2001-style Ligeti soundtrack… aeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……)

Also, this is super cute – and great to see what young people are doing with this stuff, especially knowing this is a tough time for them and they deserve some fresh opportunities.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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Tech Companies Want AI to Fix the Disastrous Vaccine Rollout

Across the US, the government’s early attempts to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine have been, at best, underwhelming.

In Ohio, nearly 900 doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine went to waste because a provider stored them at the wrong temperature. In New York City, clinics were forced to hold onto vaccine doses for weeks instead of administering them to high-risk patients, or even throw them out, because they couldn’t find anyone who met the state’s stringent criteria for the first phase of inoculation. Florida, meanwhile, partnered with the event ticket platform Eventbrite to manage vaccine appointments, resulting in a confusing, biased, and scam-prone distribution system.

Distributing the limited number of COVID-19 vaccines to the people who most need them is a daunting logistical challenge, and in many cases, the bureaucratic, human-run systems charged with overseeing it have fallen short. In some states, broken and confusing scheduling systems have driven frustrated residents to write code and build their own volunteer websites for booking vaccine appointments.

It’s the kind of problem, some tech firms say, that is ripe for artificially intelligent overseers—and it may be the very thing needed to jump-start a lucrative new era of automated health care decision-making and delivery.

“I think it did, in many ways, take the COVID-19 pandemic to put that rocket fuel behind AI” in health care, Dr. John Showalter, the chief product officer for Jvion, a clinical AI company that’s been operating since 2011, told Motherboard. “I feel like we’re right on that precipice. 2021 is going to have a lot of reports out about how clinical AI helped with COVID-19. By 2025, people are going to be like ‘clinical AI, yawn’” because it’s so ubiquitous.

There is a spectrum of use cases for AI in vaccine distribution. Health systems are already using AI chatbots from companies like Hyro and Praktice AI to field calls from the large number of patients inquiring about whether they’re eligible for the vaccines, and to schedule appointments and follow ups.

Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft have developed vaccine management systems that incorporate AI at various levels, including planning trucking routes and maintaining dose temperatures.But the potential applications that are generating the most excitement, and skepticism, are AI tools designed to automate or influence decisions about where vaccines should go in the country—and who should get them.

In the early months of the pandemic, California asked companies to propose technological solutions to problems like COVID-19 test shortages. Aible, an AI startup based in the state, offered—for free—to create algorithmic models that would identify who to prioritize in testing in order to save lives and reduce the pandemic’s economic impact. State officials didn’t respond to the offer, Aible CEO Arijit Sengupta, told Motherboard, but he said the company is now talking with one of the major vaccine makers about creating a similar system to guide vaccine supply chains and prioritization.

A mock up provided by Aible of how its vaccine prioritization models might look to users.

“Matching up the demand and supply is something that’s not happening right now,” he said. “It would be better than what we are doing today—it would not be perfect, nothing is ever perfect—but what is good about a system like this is it learns on a daily basis and it adjusts.”

Most states are currently in the first phases of vaccination, where almost all available doses are reserved for health care workers, people over 65, and some individuals with chronic conditions. But once those populations are inoculated, states will have to make difficult decisions about where to send doses and who to prioritize next.

Jvion has created models that map which areas of the country and which population groups are most likely to experience severe effects or die if exposed to a wave of COVID-19 and, separately, which areas are the highest priorities for vaccine distribution based on the CDC’s prioritization recommendations and other health and socio-economic factors. The company has sent analyses of millions of patients to its customers, which include health systems, to guide their vaccine outreach.

Take Perry County, Pennsylvania. One of Jvion’s models, which incorporates the CDC’s guidelines, labels the county a very low priority for vaccination. But its other model, measuring community vulnerability to COVID-19, considers Perry County at the highest level of risk for severe, community-wide morbidity.

Jvion's COVID-19 model for Perry County, PA demonstrates how AI might help states allocate vaccines to high-risk areas they might otherwise overlook.

The reasons for the disparity aren’t necessarily intuitive. They draw on data that health systems likely aren’t considering and algorithmic pattern matching that is, by definition, unhuman. Why is Perry County at such high risk for COVID-19 morbidity? According to Jvion’s models, the fact that a county has “low commercial retail availability” and “low commercial/industrial job density” are influential risk indicators. Factors that influence the calculated risk level in other counties include the rate at which residents commute more than 60 minutes to work and the prevalence of environmental health hazards.

Jvion’s models are trained on a database of 36 million “independent lives,” Dr. Showalter said. That includes people’s medical claim records, socio-economic information about where they live from agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture, and credit scoring data from companies like Experian and Transunion. As they built the models, there was nowhere near enough information available about actual COVID-19 cases, so Jvion instead trained its models primarily on data about the health care trajectories of people with respiratory conditions and illnesses like Influenza.

Jvion’s models are not currently being used as automatic decision making systems—determining who gets prioritized for vaccines without human oversight. But AI is increasingly being used to inform a variety of triaging problems in health care, and experts say a regulatory action plan for medical AI that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published in January is a long-awaited signal that the agency is preparing to open the doors to a new array of medical AI tools.

Currently, in order for AI systems to be eligible for FDA approval as medical devices, they must be static tools—the algorithmic model that comes out of the box doesn’t change. But one of the strengths of this kind of technology is that models can constantly be trained on new data, tweaked, and improved over time. The agency’s new action plan calls for it to develop guidelines for allowing, and regulating, evolving systems.

Monitoring continuously changing algorithms that contribute to life-or-death decision making is a tricky proposition, though, and one that has kept the FDA from moving more quickly to accept these kinds of systems as medical devices.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up health care providers’ adoption of AI tools—such as home monitoring systems for vital signs that reduce the chances of virus transmission. These tools may not need FDA approval as medical devices, but nonetheless influence health care decision making, Sara Gerke, a research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, told Motherboard. That increased exposure will likely quicken the industry’s adoption of more advanced, higher-stakes tools, despite the many legal and ethical issues that remain.

“I personally believe that AI has potential for being used for allocation of vaccines, but that’s for the future,” Gerke said. “I would not trust the AI right now because there will be so many hidden biases in the data. First of all, what kind of data do you even use? Even if you take it from the electronic health records data then you already have a bias because in Black communities, many can’t even go to the doctor. Right now using it, I find it very difficult.”

Tech Companies Want AI to Fix the Disastrous Vaccine Rollout syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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europythonsociety · 4 years

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List of EPS Board Candidates for 2020/2021

At this year’s EuroPython Society General Assembly (GA), on September 20th, we will vote in a new board of the EuroPython Society for the term 2020/2021.

List of Board Candidates

The EPS bylaws require one chair, one vice chair and 2 - 7 board members. The following candidates have stated their willingness to work on the EPS board. We are presenting them here (in alphabetical order by surname).

We will be updating this list in the coming days. Please send in any nominations or self-nominations until 2020-08-29 to [email protected]. The final update will happen on 2020-08-30.

Please note that our bylaws do not restrict nominations to people on this list. It is even possible to self-nominate or nominate other candidates at the GA itself. However, in the interest of giving members a better chance to review the candidate list, we’d like to encourage all nominations to be made before the GA.

Prof. Martin Christen

Teaching Python / using Python for research projects

Martin Christen is a professor of Geoinformatics and Computer Graphics at the Institute of Geomatics at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). His main research interests are geospatial Virtual- and Augmented Reality, 3D geoinformation, and interactive 3D maps.

Martin is very active in the Python community. He teaches various Python-related courses and uses Python in most research projects. He organizes the PyBasel meetup - the local Python User Group Northwestern Switzerland. He also organizes the yearly GeoPython conference. He is also a board member of the Python Software Verband e.V.

I would be glad to help with EuroPython, to be part of a great team that makes the next edition of EuroPython even better, wherever it will be hosted (even online).

Nicolás Demarchi

Pythonista / Software Engineer

Nicolás is a self-taught software engineer working professionally for more than 15 years. After participating on some Linux User Groups and the Mozilla community, Nicolás joined the Python community around 2012, fell in love with it and never left. He is a founder and has been a board member of the Python Argentina NGO since 2016. In the PyAr community, as an organizer, he participated several events and conferences as organizer and/or speaker, ranging from Python Days in various cities, PyCamp and the Python Argentina national conference, being a core organizer in the 2018 one in Buenos Aires (an open and free conference with ~1500 attendees). Since 2014 Nicolás has been maintaining the Python Argentina infrastructure that supports the mailing list, webpages, etc. He was (still helping a bit) the host of the Buenos Aires Python Meetup. In June 2019, Nicolás moved to Amsterdam and he is currently living and working there. A few months after the move, he joined the organization of the Python Amsterdam meetup and he is working with a small team to build the local community: py.amsterdam. He also joined the https://pycamp.es/ team trying to replicate the Pycamp Argentina experience in Europe. In 2020 he volunteered in the Media Workgroup of Europython 2020 online as a core organizer.

I would like to join the EPS board members because I think Europython is the event connecting all european communities and therefore the right place to invest my time. In addition, I believe I can learn a lot as a volunteer and my experience and contacts in Latin America can also result in fruitful exchanges with the EPS.

Raquel Dou

Linguist / Python enthusiast

Raquel befriended Python in 2013, during her MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition, where she used Python to model a simple communication system’s evolution over time. She runs a business providing language services and often uses Python to make her work and life easier and more fun.

She was an onsite volunteer in 2018 when EuroPython took place at her doorstep (Edinburgh), and has since been helping with preparations for the 2019 conference in the support and sponsor workgroups. In 2020, she served on the board and had the honour of working with a cracking team in the media workgroup bringing EuroPython 2020 online. Whatever uncertainty is ahead in 2021, she trusts our amazing team will bring us to a good and exciting place, and would love to be part of the exhilarating journey again.

Anders Hammarquist

Pythonista / Consultant / Software architect

Anders is running his own Python consultancy business, AB Struse, since 2019 and is currently mostly involved with using Python in industrial automation. He has been using Python since 1995, and fosters its use in at least four companies.

He helped organize EuroPython 2004 and 2005, and has attended and given talks at several EuroPythons since then. He has handled the Swedish financials of the EuroPython Society since 2016 and has served as board member since 2017.

Cheukting Ho

Pythonista / Developer Advocate / Data Scientist

After spending 5 years researching theoretical physics at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Cheuk has transferred her analytical and logical skills in natural science and built a career in data science. Cheuk has been a Data Scientist in one of the biggest worldwide wholesalers in the travel business; an AWS partnered consultancy which delivers machine learning model; a startup aiming to revolutionise revenue management with data science and; a global bank using machine learning to investigating financial crime. Now Cheuk is working in a team of developers building a revolutionary graph database. Cheuk constantly contributes to the community by giving AI and deep learning workshops and organize sprints for open source projects, at the same time contribute to open source projects including Pandas, Keras, Scikit-learn, Dateutil and maintaining open-source libraries. Cheuk has also been a guest speaker at Universities and various conferences. Believing in gender equality, Cheuk is currently a co-organizer of AI Club for Gender Minorities to support Tech Diversity and Inclusion. On top of speaking at conferences, Cheuk has joined the organizing team of EuroPython as a member of the programming workgroup since 2019 and was hosting the lightning talk in the same year.

Learning from the experience of EuroPython 2020 which is an online edition, using the internet for participation and getting involved becomes an option. With this in mind, Cheuk would like to be part of the EPS board to make Python communities to be more connected, more diverse and inclusive. She would like to make EuroPython more accessible to Python lovers across the continent or even across the globe. She would also like to be an ambassador to engage conversations with various Python communities around the world.

Marc-André Lemburg

Pythonista / CEO / Consultant / Interim CTO

Marc-Andre is the CEO and founder of eGenix.com, a Python-focused project and consulting company based in Germany. He has a degree in mathematics from the University of Düsseldorf. His work with and for Python started in 1994, in 1997 he became Python Core Developer and later designed, implemented and maintained the Unicode support in Python. Marc-Andre is a founding member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and has served on the PSF Board several times.

In 2002, Marc-Andre was on the executive committee to run the first EuroPython conference in Charleroi, Belgium. He was elected as board member of the EuroPython Society (EPS) in 2012 and enjoyed the last few years working with the EPS board members on developing the distributed EuroPython workgroup structure, while maintaining the EuroPython spirit and fun aspects of the conference.

For the EuroPython 2017 - 2020 editions, Marc-Andre was chair of the EuroPython Society and ran lots of activities around the conference organization, e.g. managing the contracts and budget, helping with sponsors, the website and conference app, writing blog posts and many other things that were needed to make EuroPython happen.

Going forward, he would like to focus on having the EPS provide more help for other organizers of events and conferences in Europe, not only financially via the grants program, but also by helping with our acquired knowledge and experience in running community events. In addition, of course, to running the annual EuroPython conference and starting experiments with additional smaller events.

Jason C. McDonald

Author, Software Developer, Python enthusiast

Jason C. McDonald has been coding and writing about software development since 2010, first picking up the Python language in 2012. He’s the founder of MousePaw Media, an open source organization that trains software development interns through a year-long remote program designed to equip them for a successful career. He has developed desktop applications, games, and libraries using the Python and C++ programming languages.

Jason is the author of the forthcoming “Dead Simple Python” book from No Starch Press, which is based on his popular article series on DEV, explaining the finer points of Python for newcomers to the language. He is an active member of the Python community via Freenode IRC, where he enjoys answering questions and debating the finer points of Pythonic practice. He was the first tag moderator for the Python tag on DEV, where he continues to regularly advise on moderation policies as one of the community moderators, to foster the safe and healthy community DEV has come to be known for. He’s an outspoken advocate for diversity, inclusion, and mutual understanding through communication.

Jason first joined EuroPython 2020 as a volunteer to help with the transition to an online format, and fell in love with the conference and its diverse and distributed community.

Francesco Pierfederici

Pythonista / Director of Engineering / Python Trainer / Python Author / Beer Brewer / Astronomer

The year 2000 was supposed to be the distant future for Francesco’s generation. We were supposed to be driving flying cars, being able to golf on the ocean floor, wear spandex suites and vacation on Mars.

While nothing of that sort came to be, something incredible happened that year nevertheless: Francesco stumbled upon an amazing language called Python and was immediately enthralled by its elegance and speed of development. He soon threw away C, Java and (gasp!) Perl and has not looked back since.

While in the US, together with amazing folks like Perry Greenfield, he spearheaded the Python revolution in astronomy. He is the author of the Python pipeline frameworks used on the NASA HST, JWST and HLA missions. Back in Europe, he introduced Python in the core business of one of the largest and most conservative companies in the world. He ran Python on the top 10 most powerful computers processing weather simulations. He is currently serving as Director of Engineering at IRAM (https://www.iram-institute.org), driving one of the largest radio telescopes in the world with (you guessed it) Python. I his free time, he is trying to optimise his beer brewing with a host of sensors and micro controllers running MicroPython.

Francesco has a degree in astronomy, has been programming since BASIC was cool and lives in southern Spain with his wife and two cats. Francesco is currently organising the 2020 edition of ADASS (https://adass2020.es), the premier conference on astronomical software development. He has been volunteering at EuroPython since the conference in Rimini in 2017 and has helped with the ep2019 website and its port to Python 3.

Why serve on the EPS board? Francesco loves the EuroPython conference and its volunteers, organisers and attendees. He would love the opportunity to give back to this community and to the Python community in general. A community that has given him so much.

Silvia Uberti

Sysadmin / IT Consultant

She is a Sysadmin with a degree in Network Security, really passionate about technology, traveling and her piano.

She’s an advocate for women in STEM disciplines and supports inclusiveness of underrepresented people in tech communities.

She fell in love with Python and its warm community during PyCon Italia in 2014 and became a member of EuroPython Sponsor Workgroup in 2017.

She enjoys a lot working in it and wants to help more!

Stéphane Wirtel

Pythonista / CEO / Software Architect / Consultant / Coach

Stéphane is the CEO and founder of mgx.io, a Python-focused consulting company based in Belgium since 2017. He has started to use Python in 2001 with the Aragne company in Belgium and was a helper for the two first EuroPython in Charleroi (his hometown).

Formerly core dev of the Odoo software, Stéphane is a fellow member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) since 2013 and works with the marketing and fellowship teams of the PSF.

He has also received a Community Service Award from the PSF during PyCon 2017 for the creation of PythonFOSDEM and contributions to the Python Ecosystem in Belgium.

In July 2014, Stéphane became a member of the EuroPython Society and started to contribute to the web site and some other topics of EuroPython, he was also the financial auditor of EuroPython Society for EuroPython 2017/2018/2019.

He gave a lot of Python talks at EuroPython, PyCon France, UK, PyCon Ireland, Canada, Italy, Germany, Ukraine, and Slovakia.

He became a Python Core Developer in 2019 and Board Member of EuroPython Society for EuroPython 2020 in Dublin, where he worked in the Program WG, Communication WG, Sponsors WG, and Web WG.

In 2020, he became a Director of Python Ireland where he works on the web site and the several components of the Python Ireland infra.

For the future, I would like to help the organizers of the European PyCons with the EuroPython Society and continue EuroPython 2021 in Dublin and the next EuroPythons in Europe.

What does the EPS Board do ?

The EPS board runs the day-to-day business of the EuroPython Society, including running the EuroPython conference events. It is allowed to enter contracts for the society and handle any issues that have not been otherwise regulated in the bylaws or by the General Assembly. Most business is handled on the board’s Telegram group or by email on the board mailing list. Board meetings are usually run as conference calls.

It is important to note that the EPS board is an active board, i.e. the board members are expected to put in a significant amount of time and effort towards the goals of the EPS and for running the EuroPython conference. This usually means 200+ hours work over a period of one year, with most of this being needed in the last six months before the conference. Many board members put in even more work to make sure that the EuroPython conferences become a success.

Board members are generally expected to take on leadership roles within the EuroPython Workgroups in order to facilitate good communication and quick decision making. They should be passionate about EuroPython, the Python community and working in a team of volunteers.

Thanks, – EuroPython Society

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thorndale-industries · 7 years

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On Robert’s and Gillian’s Relationship

So, to my surprise a bunch of people approached me lately, asking about the relationship and dynamics Robert and Gillian have. I decided to write this little overview to give you a basic insight and to show you how they progress.

First of all, I want to point out at the very beginning that both of them are narcissistic, abusive, and sociopathic. They (emotionally) abused all of their previous partners as they did not really care about them and rather used them to full fill certain needs while barely giving anything back. One of the biggest issues is that both are skilled smooth talkers and charmers, who know how to to charm the pants off someone. Their relationship to each other might appear as very affectionate and loving (and it is after a certain point), and I will try my best to explain to you why this is so.

2017-2020: Robert and Gillian first meet in 2017, when Morgan invites them both to dinner at his please and introducing his new student to Gillian, saying that the two of them will be working together in the future and he (Robert) might be a good recruit for Majestic 12. Two very strong and stubborn personalities clash against each other that night, both unwilling to step back just in the slightest and quickly a very toxic and tensed atmosphere between them arises.

Gillian hates Robert for having a choice to join the Illuminati, while she had been forced to be there since birth. She had to live under their rule, never had the taste of freedom the young man in front of her enjoys so greatly. She becomes jealous, envious, furious. She starts to point out every single flaw he has to undermine his competence, trying her best to get him kicked out of the Order. He is nothing but a beggar in fine clothes, pretending to be part of the Adult’s Club while rolling himself in mud - he is not worthy to be where he is, to be offered the chance to rise to the sun. Of course Robert refused to be the inferior Gillian tried him to be, and he fought back whenever he could.

The first change in their dynamic happens more than a year later in late 2018, when there is an outbreak in the VersaLife lab at Omega Ranch, killing big parts of the population of Singapore. The evening Robert gets the news about the incident, he is desperate enough to visit Gillian in his seek for help since he was in Paris and no one else answered his calls. While she did not take it very well that he showed up unannounced and told him that this is how the game is played and he needs to get used to this, she slowly realized how much he actually gets used by the higher ranked members of the Illuminati. She starts to see how Robert is just a puppet as a low ranking member, someone who gets thrown under the bus when necessary - she starts to see a bit of herself in him. Her attitude towards him remains apathetic and stoic, harsh, but internally the ice slowly breaks.

A month later she visits him at his home in San Francisco, and although she does not outright apologize for behaviour as she is still convinced that she did nothing wrong and Robert is not suitable for the Order, she offers him a deal of partnership. Her previous attempts of getting him kicked out have failed, so she decided to turn him into an useful tool, one she could shape as she desires. They start to date quickly after this, but it mostly based on the mutual respect that they slowly accept and to take care of the tension between them. Their relationship is not really affectionate or driven by love, they are pretty casual and how they treat each other - a way of satisfying certain personal needs. But in its core they are still not highly in favour of the other, falling back into the abusive and narcissistic patterns they both have, but there is one thing none of them expected: They met an equal.

Over the next 2 years Gillian teaches him many secrets about the Order, actively promoting the unusual career the man makes to make him a powerful ally against the Council. Her goals are egoistic and selfish, just as much as he uses her to gain knowledge he wouldn’t be able to get otherwise, but over the time, the more time they spent together, the closer they grow. Gillian realized that her intentions shift from solely getting a strong ally for her own personal fight to wanting to protect the man from all the misery, lies and games she had to go through herself. She wants to protect him from all the pain the Council causes as he blindly stepped into this mess - and she can’t really tell why she cares for him out of the sudden. She feels like a distant observer, seeing a man getting on the path she had to walk on once, and she wants to yell and warn him to not do this. And she involuntarily starts to become softer around him. Robert on the other side notices that the white haired woman he used to fight and yell with does indeed care for him, doing more for him than was necessary, and instead of using this once again to his advantage, he reacts the same way. Finally, he is able to breath out and let all the weight from his chest fall off without fearing of being backstabbed. They start to bond through a mutual goal, and they become a team.

2020-2025: As the power couple starts to become an actual couple that stays together out of love and affection, their main focus is still their work and achieving what they want, together. They now know that the other is not an enemy, an obstacle in their way, but instead a helping hand that makes the climb easier. And someone who will catch you in case you might fall down.

While their professional relationship gets stronger by the day, they still struggle in their private life. Both of them are not the easiest people to be around with, and they are both used to fight and demand in order to survive - they never learned how to give. And they have to learn that there is someone else in their life now. But they are both willing to work on their rocky relationship as they see how much it benefits them in many ways, and how they both long for each other in many different ways and feel cold and left alone without the other. Over time, they feel like the other fills the deep gaps and holes they have, two broken pieces that only need a certain level of finishing, get a bit smoother around the edges to fit together perfectly. And they finally admit that what they feel is love.

Robert and Gillian are opposites in many ways like fire and ice - Robert the hot tempered, easily angered man who constantly seems to be tensed and ready to throw a tantrum and Gillian, a woman who always appears calm and collected. A woman patient enough to endure the outbreaks the man has, never leaving his side.

They get engaged in 2024 and marry in the following year, willing to stay together in public as business partners and in private as caring and loving married people. Until death tears us apart.

They even get a dog a few months later after the ceremony.

2025-2052: Their bond gets stronger and stronger, and more and more they start to see each other as one. They plot together, work together, live together while still maintaining enough independence. They become a deeply connected couple, caring for each other, but to everyone else their attitude becomes worse and more cold over time. They are a unity, but one that is united in their hate towards everyone who stands in their way. The toxicity and abusive behaviour among them is mostly gone, but in reality it only shifted to everyone else around them.

Robert and Gillian start to get lost in their shared god complex, believing they were chosen to rule the world as King and Queen - the only ones capable to take care of humanity. And they don’t back off from doing everything to achieve the role they perceive as being withdrawn by the Council. And so, they push each other deeper into this mad fantasy, making everything worse. Their hunger for power becomes insatiable.

Together they overthrow the Illuminati, force the other members into hiding who they see as their real abusers and people who actively prevent the world from progressing. In their own distorted world Robert and Gillian see themselves as the saviours of humanity, freeing it from the chocking grip of old people who lost their touch to everyone a long time ago and only abused their power for their own goals. They are the perfect beings the Illuminati always talked about, they are the ones who are worthy of true leadership.

Prior and during the events of Deus Ex 1, their relationship becomes more unstable, especially because of Gillian. She shows resistance towards the plan of her husband becoming a God through merging with an AI. Not only because she is convinced that the technology is not ready yet and will only lead to his death, she is selfish and egoistic and refuses to let him go. She has to accept to sacrifice him for the greater goal, since this is what they worked so hard for for decades.

They both know it won’t be like it used to be anymore, and this realization creates the strongest bond they ever had before it changes forever.

#//a new dynasty out of ashes [Gillian & Robert]#//anatomy of prodigies [Headcanon]

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darylelockhart · 5 years

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How data science in and for Africa can blaze new trails

by Wim Delva

Africa is data-rich and well connected. Therein lies the solution to many of its challenges. S.Gvozd/Shutterstock

The term “data science” was coined by scientists working at the social networks LinkedIn and Facebook in 2008. A few years later, they dubbed it “the sexiest profession of the 21st century”.

This relatively new, interdisciplinary field is a blend of statistics, computer science, mathematics, engineering and subject matter knowledge. In fact, any and all subjects qualify. Its proponents believe it will transform every aspect of society. Many of the disruptive, game-changing innovations that are grounded in data science are intended to improve people’s quality of life as well as the efficiency of processes and services. Examples include autonomous vehicles; precision medicine and precision agriculture; smart cities and financial technology.

Over the past decade, virtually every university in Europe and North America has responded to the challenges and opportunities of data science by establishing new institutes, departments and degree programmes in the field.

Academic institutions in Africa have only recently begun to catch up. Some are creating structures, networks and training programmes to stimulate research and capacity development in the subject. Examples include the African Center of Excellence in Data Science in Rwanda, the AI & Data Science Research Group at Makerere University in Uganda, Data Science Africa, and the Deep Learning Indaba. But with a time lag of at least half a decade, the question is whether Africa is bound to be trailing behind.

As the acting director of the new School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, I would argue that the answer is a resounding no. If African universities are mindful of the continent’s specific needs and realities, they have a unique opportunity to blaze new trails in what is still largely uncharted territory.

These opportunities lie particularly in two areas. The first involves creating data science programmes for people who aren’t on campus. The second relates to partnering with governments and businesses to address Africa’s most important societal challenges and capitalise on opportunities for economic growth.

Mobile access

Less than 10% of people younger than 25 have access to higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

It is not that the continent’s youth are uninterested in a higher education degree. Many are simply unable to afford full-time on-campus studies. So, if students can’t come to the university, the university must come to the students. The internet and a myriad of innovative distance learning platforms make this possible.

Only 40% of Africa’s population has access to the internet. That’s compared to 61% for the rest of the world. But the internet penetration rate is increasing faster on the continent than anywhere else. Bite-size online content can be taken as standalone modules or cumulated into a certified degree. Either way, online distance education formats can be offered at a lower cost. They are also more scalable than traditional classroom teaching.

In this way, Africa’s youth has the chance to earn a degree while maintaining informal or formal employment. This makes it a financially viable proposition. They can also stay physically connected to their social networks of families and friends. This is important in preventing internal brain drains and exacerbating socio-economic disparities within and between African countries.

Data science lends itself particularly well to being taught through online learning programmes. This is because thriving in a virtual classroom requires the same creative, solution-oriented mindset that characterises the best data scientists. And much of the programme’s content – like managing and analysing data, writing code and deploying software solutions – happens from behind a laptop which is connected to the Cloud anyway.

Large corporates are another possible target audience. Many are eager to use data science to extract more value out of the data they’ve been collecting. The Vitality programme is a prime example. The South African insurance company Discovery uses trackers of physical activity, healthy grocery shopping and driving behaviour to incentivise healthy living and safe driving.

However, many companies lack the internal capacity to make their business model more data-driven. They could improve the situation by partnering with academic institutions to develop shorter term online and blended learning programmes for staff in particular departments.

These partnerships benefit everyone. Importantly, they also mean that the business and academic environments can share the risk of developing new learning materials and maximise these programmes’ relevance to the real world.

Data science in Africa, for Africa

There’s another vital area where African data science could surge out in front.

It is human nature to focus on immediate, locally perceived problems before venturing into fixing more remote ones. So people and organisations from elsewhere in the world may not always identify and try to tackle the African continent’s problems. These issues include improving access and equity in health care; improving road safety and bolstering food security.

Data science, led by Africa-based scientists, could play a key role in addressing all of these needs. That’s not to say collaborations with overseas partners should be discarded. These bring complementary expertise; avoid reinventing the wheel, and make it possible to make larger investments and ultimately have a bigger impact.

But local academics should take the lead in developing data-driven solutions to local challenges. They understand the social, cultural and political contexts. They are connected to the government departments, non-profit organisations and businesses that can put theoretical models into practice.

Solutions and service

My colleagues and I at the school – launched officially on July 29 – are excited to join the growing network of universities in Africa that are training the data scientists who will help shape the continent’s future. That future is one of ever-changing data, analytics and computer infrastructure. So our focus will be on teaching and practising data science in interdisciplinary joint ventures with partners in academia, industry and government. In this way we can design, test, validate and scale up home-grown, future-proof solutions and services to Africa’s challenges and business opportunities.

Wim Delva is Acting director of the School for Data Science and Computational Thinking at Stellenbosch University

This article is republished from my good friends over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

#artificial intelligence #technology #africa

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geekade · 7 years

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Zwia Reviews: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets a.k.a. Valerian and the Eyebrows that are more Interesting than Most of the Movie

Valerian… oh boy… Let's get into a quick little history lesson here people. Don’t worry, it’ll be fun and YES it is important to the review. Oh, but first, because I love to sum up my feelings of the movie early just in case you’re pressed for time, YES this movie is neat LOOKING. NO it isn’t very “good.” It’s watchable, but make sure the lights are on and you aren’t laying down.

ANYWAY, HISTORY!!!! Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is based on the the French comic Valerian and Laureline. This comic started in the late 1960’s, is a crazy sci-fi sort of space opera with time travel and multidimensional stuff… ANDDDDD helped inspire little movies like The Fifth Element and STAR-FUCKING-WARS. So this comic is kind of a big fucking deal. Now, the reason this is important to bring up is that Valerian probably would be a much more impressive movie if so much that made it impressive wasn’t already ingrained into pop culture about 40 years ago thanks to Star Wars. Basically, Valerian does a bunch of cool stuff, but it's all old and unimpressive by today’s standards because it's all been done before, and done better. In Star Wars. For example, you know how Ghost in the Shell’s original story brought up the whole questions of identity and humanity and what that means for robots and AI… but then those ideas inspired things like The Matrix that took it further and when Ghost in the Shell finally made a mainstream live-action movie, it basically got beaten to the punch by it’s own idea child? Yeah, we basically have that with Valerian.

The creatures, the potentially untrustworthy government, the space battles… its nice but nothing super special. Even the designs of many of the suits are all very Star Wars-esque. Which again, is sad, because if anything, Star Wars should be in Valerian's shadow. But that’s not even its biggest problem. I mean The Force Awakens is just A New Hope-Super HD Edition, but I enjoy that just fine. No, Valerian’s biggest problem is its actors and script. Dane DeHaan plays Valerian and Cara Delevingne plays Laureline, the two main characters. I made sure to put an eyebrow joke in the title of this review, so you’re not getting any more. I’m sorry. I need to keep this at least somewhat classy...

But Holy shit the two of them, if they had a kid, that kid would have the most damn distinct eyebrows ever. You could see them from space. He’d never need a visor because the eyebrows alone would protect his eyes. He would need to make sure he only washed them once a week because they would take forever to dry. Moving on… so I LOVE these two. I cannot explain why, but these two actors I just can’t help but root for. It might be because I’ve followed their careers pretty closely and yet have never REALLY fully enjoyed a single movie either have been in. Admittedly, I’ve yet to see A Cure for Wellness, so there is still hope, but GOSH I just feel like they both get cast in such shit movies. The streak continues with Valerain, and most of the fault is with these two. They are both… not fantastic in this movie. I can’t really describe it easily but the best I can come up with is that their acting is like… they are trying to always remain cool and calm and collected the entire movie, but they do it very dramatically. Like, if you really like a person and you’re trying to talk to them but you’re trying really hard to act like it’s not a big deal and it's kinda over-emphasizing how not a big deal you’re making it… which of course is making it a super obvious big fucking deal??? Yeah, that’s them. THE ENTIRE MOVIE.

Even when one of them appears to be dead, the other is all like “Get up” But calmly… but still not? Also, they sound like every line of theirs was dubbed over in post… like the ENTIRE movie. Now, to get further into my problems with them, I have to delve into the OTHER major flaw in the movie… THE SCRIPT. Damn this movie is poorly written. For starters, when it comes to our leads, I’m still pretty unsure if they were terrible because the acting was bad or just the writing for them was so bad it made the acting seem bad. There’s really no way to know for sure. But someone fucked up somewhere. And these leads??? Let me sum up EVERYTHING they say the entire movie (Don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything here) Movie starts: Main actors talk about each other, summarizing exactly who they are and what their personalities are supposed to be so that the audience knows. No really, the first two minutes of these two is them walking around a spaceship telling us EXACTLY who they are. Thanks. Then the rest of the movie is either action scene after action scene OR the two main characters alone with each other in which cases it's Valerian being all “Hey, Laureline, we both dig each other. We should get married.” Responded by Laureline “No way. You have commitment issues” Over. And over. And over. Come on guys! This can’t be all your characters have to offer!!! PLEASEEEEE have more substance than this!!! There IS a small piece of character growth for both… but it’s very small and results in literally a single conversation between the two of them that changes both of their minds on two small things. But that’s all we get. Otherwise the characters you got in the beginning… same ones you're getting in the end.

Oh, and while we’re on the script of endless pointless action scenes interrupted by creeper trying to marry his partner, let's talk about the villain. The villain of the movie is supposed to be a big reveal towards the end of the movie. I’m not going to tell you who it is. But the minute you see him, you’ll have figured out the big reveal. Awesome job movie. Totally saw every plot point coming from like a mile away. Thanks. God damn. Also, pretty much EVERY plot point ever gets explained directly to the camera… even though you could already see it so you KNEW already… except one thing at the end. The thing that makes NO DAMN SENSE and I NEEDED it explained… but oh NOW you’re gonna let us figure it out for ourselves???? Fuck you, movie and you’re indecisive exposition. Fuck you! (What, there are kids reading this? Nonsense, no one ACTUALLY reads my reviews. You cray-cray) This pisses me off. You have to understand. I LOVE The Fifth Element, and Luc Besson made The Fifth Element BECAUSE he couldn’t make Valerian and Laureline at the time. THIS is pretty much his life’s goal and… it’s just so damn disappointing. It's gorgeous, don’t get me wrong, and I’m not saying it doesn't still have really neat original ideas, because it totally does! The beginning of the movie has a whole chase scene that spans multiple dimensions and I thought it was the COOLEST THING!!!! But THAT level of creativity disappears pretty damn quickly and becomes nothing but a terribly acted, predictable slog of a movie. Amazing atmosphere, and some really cool stuff and characters… but we never get to focus on the cool characters or places. There’s this whole giant epic space station, and we’re stuck in basically the sewers of it… with the eyebrow patrol. Meanwhile, we get teased with these crafty information merchant goblin things, and Rihanna’s character Bubble, who was both more interesting and way better portrayed, (Seriously, Rihanna did the best performance of the entire movie) but we only see them for at best a handful of minutes. I guess I just expected more. Something more interesting or fun, and I just got… i don't know. But I know there is way more to the Valerian franchise, so while I can’t suggest you see this movie I DO hope it does well enough for further installments. I’d still like to see Dane and Cara, I’d still like to see this universe, and I’d still like to see what COULD be around the corner (Please some damn time travel stories) So yeah, I can’t with a clear conscience suggest this movie to you. Take a chance on Dunkirk or Baby Driver instead. But I also wouldn’t mind this movie making enough to warrant a sequel. I think he future of the Valerian universe has enough to offer, and I certainly would like to see Luc, Cara, and Dane get a win for once. They try so hard.

#articles #movies #Movies

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kennethmjoyner · 3 years

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iManage CEO Neil Araujo: ‘Making Knowledge Work is Why We Exist’

It has been quite a journey for the document management company iManage. Cofounded in 1995 by Neil Araujo and Rafiq Mohammadi, it was acquired in 2003 by Interwoven for $171 million. In 2009, Autonomy acquired Interwoven for $775 million, and then in 2011 Hewlett Packard purchased Autonomy for $11.1 billion, getting iManage in the deal.

But the Autonomy acquisition turned into a fiasco for HP due to alleged accounting improprieties by Autonomy, resulting in both litigation and a write-down of nearly $8.8 billion of the purchase price.

Amid this turmoil, the iManage leadership was able to buy out the company and its business from HP. Cofounders Araujo and Mohammadi returned to top leadership roles as CEO and chief scientist, respectively, and set to work on reinvigorating the core on-premises product and relaunching its cloud product, which it did in 2016 as iManage Cloud.

Since then, it has made several key acquisitions, including of UK artificial intelligence company RAVN Systems in 2017 and last year of legal transaction management company Closing Folders.

Still management owned, the Chicago-based company is a market leader for document management, with more than 750 employees and 2,500 law firms using its platform, according to its website, including many of the world’s largest firms.

Last week, just ahead of the start of ILTACON, Araujo sat down with me via Zoom for a conversation about where the company is today and its roadmap for the future. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, which I have edited for clarity, concision and continuity.

AMBROGI: Maybe you can start by giving an overview of where you are today. What are the highlights?

ARAUJO: Sure. I’ll break that up into two parts. One is the commercial update and the second is what are we doing from an executed vision and an execution standpoint.

In terms of a commercial update, as we started this conversation, what we thought would be a few weeks working from home is 18 months and growing. The irony of it, though, is that iManage is about 70% bigger from revenue standpoint.

AMBROGI: From a revenue standpoint?

ARAUJO: Yes, from a revenue standpoint, we’ve added that much, just over the last 18 months. And it’s primarily based on the strength of our cloud business. Our business has grown 200% in a little over a year, so it’s probably greater if you consider the last 18 months.

AMBROGI: Does that include customers of the on-prem version moving over to the cloud?

ARAUJO: Yes. When we report cloud revenue, it is net new customers as well as customers that may be on-prem that have moved to the cloud. We’ve seen an acceleration there that is probably driven by COVID, driven by remote working, and by this understanding that remote working is not a temporary phenomenon, but probably go to stay in some form – not in exactly the same way as it is right now, but in some form.

So that’s been the big story from a revenue standpoint and a commercial standpoint, but the more exciting bit for me, Bob, as someone that has been in this industry and at iManage since day one, is what impact we’re having in the market. We’ve done some of our largest and most complex deployments over the last year.

These are the likes of Baker McKenzie moving to our cloud globally, Clifford Chance, Shearman & Sterling, Borden Ladner Gervais in Canada, Allen & Overy. And we recently announced, though it’s not deployed, Linklaters, so we close the circle, so to speak, on the Magic Circle. It’s been a very rewarding year, from that standpoint.

AMBROGI: Does that mean you have all the Magic Circle at this point?

ARAUJO: Yes, we have all the Magic Circle at this point. So it’s been a rewarding year and I have to be super thankful to our ecosystem and our employees for their resilience during the period we’ve gone through.

Our decision not to do ILTA was really based on those principles. We know we will miss the social interaction, and we know that there’s some downside, but, at the end of the day, I think the health and welfare of our customers and employees comes above everything else, and it was a very simple decision from that standpoint, given Delta, given, the trends that we saw for positivity in Clark County, we just felt we had to do the right thing.

AMBROGI: I think it was a responsible thing to do, and I think it probably has led some others to reconsider their attendance.

ARAUJO: Yeah. Even though we have not gone to the event, we have changed nothing with our sponsorship, because we know that the organization requires our support at this time, more than ever, and our decision was really based on the health and welfare of the people that come there and go there.

AMBROGI: Yes.

ARAUJO: Getting back to what we’ve been up to at iManage, executing on some of these big projects has been priority number one because the majority of our implementations now are in the cloud, and these are some of the largest, most complex, cloud deployments you can talk about.

AMBROGI: Are you satisfied with the iManage Cloud? I mean, is iManage Cloud where you want it to be, or where do you still want it to get to in terms of your development?

ARAUJO: In this industry, if you’re completely satisfied, you stop, right? You’re never completely satisfied. But I couldn’t be happier with where we are relative to the rest of the market. Our entire application stack – that is, the user experience as well as the administrative and the cloud infrastructure that supports it – is brand new over the last five years. There is not a shred of line that I wrote 20 years back that’s around anymore. What that means is, in terms of security, performance, maintainability, resiliency, it is, I believe, far superior to anything that’s available in the market and anything that can be achieved on prem. So, from that perspective, I’m really, really happy.

Where we are taking it next is bringing in some of the more advanced capabilities that we have matured over the last several years, particularly in the area of knowledge and AI, and making those more easily available in our cloud architecture. What that allows a firm to do is say, “Okay, now I moved to the cloud, and now what?” And the “now what” is that now you can leverage your content, your years of history, that is trapped in your documents, and now you can leverage it in a much more powerful way. That’s the area that we are focused on over the next six, 12, 18 months.

AMBROGI: That’s the “making knowledge work” principle that the company talks about?

ARAUJO: Right. That’s one of the principle things that we worked on – going back to the market, doing the most rigorous market research we’ve done in our history. The purpose of that research was to understand something very simple: Why is it that customers invest in tech like ours? Because sometimes the outcome that customers are seeking is lost because they’re focused on the task. The task is document management, email management, records management, but the reason they invest in it is because they want to make knowledge work.

Finding that vocabulary, in a way that would resonate and would bring together everything that iManage has done and is doing over the last several years, which is that we’re not just a repository anymore, right. We have big investments in governance and in workflow, we have big investments in AI and knowledge, and making knowledge work brings all of this together because it’s the purpose of why we exist, the purpose of why customers buy technology and invest in technology like ours in the first place.

It was very big. It involved literally hundreds of conversations, over a thousand customers, and at the end of it, it was three magic words, making knowledge work. It’s informed not just our messaging and our story, it’s informed our strategy, what is it that we prioritize. And it’s informed our outlook, as we think about our organization. Once you understand the outcome that a customer is looking for, you don’t celebrate internally, you don’t celebrate until the customer has achieved that outcome, and that’s a good thing for the customer, and that’s a good thing for iManage. Does that make sense?

AMBROGI: It makes perfect sense. So, how does that inform your roadmap going forward from here? With that broader vision of making knowledge work, how do you continue down that road?

ARAUJO: There are four areas, I’d say. The first is what we call user experience and workflow. For the kinds of things that we do, we touch end user workflow significantly. If end users don’t adopt the system, there’s no point. So we’ve made a significant investment in user experience, and it’s really paid off, particularly during COVID, when you don’t have access to the same classroom training. These deployments that I talked about, in one of them, we moved over about 10,000 users over a weekend. That would have been impossible in the previous days of the technology that I wrote, because the phones would have been off the hook asking, How do I do this? How do I do that? I believe the reason we were able to do 10,000 users is the teams, both the customer team and our team that worked with them – and our partners were awesome. But the work that we put into user experience really paid off and you could have users come in on a Monday morning and go to a new system and figure it out, because we had done the design work upfront and the thinking and the taking out of the kinks upfront. So, a big focus on user experience.

I also said workflow. Workflow for us is looking at very specific areas where law firms can optimize productivity and efficiency. Last year, we announced the acquisition of Closing Folders. That’s gone really well, I couldn’t be happier with the team, couldn’t be happier with how that particular application is being adopted by customers almost organically. Closing Folders automates the legal transaction management process. If you are a transactional lawyer, particularly if you’re a transactional associate, it does magic in terms of building signature packets and distributing them and assembling them back together and building a closing binder. It’s a process that clients hate to pay for and associates hate to do, because it’s boring work, but it’s important. So you’ll see us do more in that workflows area.

Another workflow that’s in beta right now, that we will be releasing probably towards the end of the year, early next year, is called iManage Tracker, and that was developed organically, that’s not an acquisition. What Tracker does is it automates the most fundamental of legal workflows, which is the checklist. It’s the starting point for, “What do I do to tackle this particular matter?” Most people use Post-it notes. If you’re really sophisticated, you use Excel or tables in Word. We built an application around it that’s integrated into the document management experience.

So as you’re completing documents, you can check off your checklist, and everyone on the team knows exactly who’s got the ball on which document, where we are, and what the deadlines are. We think it takes a lot of stress off the people that are managing the matter and off the team that needs to know as it’s working on a complex matter. The Tracker applies not just with transactional lawyers, but we’ve seen strong resonance across different buyer groups.

I’d say workflow and user experience are probably bucket number one. Bucket number two for us is what we call the ownership experience, which is how do we make owning what iManage does cheaper, faster, better. It’s primarily the work that we are doing in our cloud, but also the work that we do in administrative tooling, so that the system is easier to manage. In our cloud, for example, all of our customers are on the latest version. And our cloud today does not require downtime to do an upgrade. You can be working and there’s an upgrade going on, and you refresh your browser and you’ve got the latest version. What that means is, we can deliver security patches, we can deliver new functionality, and since you don’t have a scheduled downtime, you’re more likely to be on the latest version. That’s an example – a real, tangible example – of how we’re advancing the ball with respect to ownership experience, making the ownership experience better.

The third pillar for us is security and governance, for obvious reasons. And that’s where we’ve invested in this in a more focused way over the last four to five years, with what we call a Zero Trust model, which is the security framework that we use in our cloud. It is the best way to deal with certain attack factors, particularly attacks that go against the data directly on the backend. And then we’ve invested significantly in what we call need-to-know security, which allows you to segment your data and manage that segmentation more easily so that, if one user’s credentials are compromised, you’ve not sold the farm, so to speak, because the data is segmented.

The third area of security and governance, which is very exciting, is the work we’ve been doing with Microsoft and Azure. It’s around leveraging some of the huge investments Microsoft has made in security, but that have been hard to leverage. For example, Azure Conditional Access, which allows you to manage more effectively who can access your data in the cloud, and which IP addresses, which machines. And then Microsoft Information Protection, which protects your documents even when they leave your networking and firewall. So when, if I email you a document, if you don’t have access to it, you will not be able to see it. That tech has been around, but very hard to really access, and we are looking at bringing that to market, in a way that’s much more consumable by small firms and large firms.

Then the final focus is on how do I mine my data for insights. I’m negotiating a clause and I’m pretty sure my firm has done this 100 times in the last one year. What position did the opposing firm take in the last 10 times that we negotiated. The answers are in our system, just very hard to get to, and the work that they’re doing with knowledge will allow us to answer those questions more and more effectively.

AMBROGI: With so much going on involving AI-driven contract systems out there right now, do you see yourself making any further acquisitions to help you build out more of that AI functionality around analyzing what’s in documents and mining that data?

ARAUJO: The bits that I talked about are technologies that we’ve been developing, building on IP that we acquired from RAVN. We are applying it at much larger scale than has been done in the industry before. When you apply this tech at DMS scale, it requires architectures that are different. There is great work that’s been going on in the AI field by some really good companies out there. We never put acquisitions off the table, but it wouldn’t be for this use case that I described. There are probably other use cases that might be interesting for us.

AMBROGI: I believe you’re still a management-owned company. Are you thinking of looking for outside investment at any point, or are you thinking about even putting the company out and going public?

ARAUJO: We value the structure that we have right now because it’s aligned what’s best for all of our stakeholders – our customers, our shareholders, and our employees. We are profitable. We’ve got positive cashflow. Our big constraint is not cash, our big constraint is talent, and how do you get people with the right cultural fit and the right intellectual fit and that are passionate about this particular market. You can expect us to be active on the M&A front – that is acquiring – as we go into 2022, along those pillars that I talked about. But at this time, we have miles to go before we sleep, to quote Robert Frost.

AMBROGI: I know that our time is up. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t hit on yet?

ARAUJO: The one thing that we get questions a lot from customers in the briefings that we’ve done with them is what they can expect from the Microsoft relationship. As you know, we announced a significantly deeper relationship with Microsoft. It’s certainly been very good for us, and I think it’s good for the customers, and involves a few things. One is it’s our embrace of Azure globally. What that does is it allows us to focus far more on the application layer rather than on the infrastructure, from a SaaS perspective. So I think you will see an acceleration in the roadmap as a result of that over time, because we’ve got more engineers focused on the applications rather than the infrastructure.

The second area where that cooperation, I think, is going to play dividends is the deeper integration with Teams and with Office 365. It’s a very seamless integration with Teams, and Teams has gotten very popular, particularly as remote working has taken hold in law firms.

The third area is in security – enabling firms to leverage investments that Microsoft has made in security, whether it is for customer-managed encryption keys, Microsoft information protection, so that you can encrypt documents when they leave the DMS, or things like Azure conditional access, which gives you a better control over who can access your information in the cloud.

We tend to be two of the largest vendors for most of our customers, so us working together is only good news for our customers.

AMBROGI: Thank you. I appreciate your taking the time this morning.

from Law and Politics https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2021/08/imanage-ceo-neil-araujo-making-knowledge-work-is-why-we-exist.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #legal

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torontotravelblog · 5 years

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Things to do this week in Toronto

What's happening in Toronto April 22-26, 2019

MONDAY, APRIL 22 (EASTER MONDAY)

Spring into Easter at the Toronto Zoo: Join for special on-site animal encounters, daily Meet the Keeper Talks, the chance of catching a glimpse of our Veterinarians at work in the Wildlife Health Centre.

Easter Lunch at Miku Toronto: Celebrate Easter with a special menu only available for Monday.

Easter Day at MARBL: Celebrate this Easter weekend with family and friends. We'll be offering Easter exclusive menu items, as well as perfecting your dinner with a bottle of wine, hand picked by our sommelier.

The Best of The Second City: The Second City’s Touring Company comes home to Toronto for an unforgettable night of classic and original sketch comedy, along with hilarious unscripted improvisation.

Queer and Present Danger Collective: Spring Queening: Hosted by Bethany Daniels featuring Sam Sferrazza, Amethyst Barron and Jade Niles Craig. Headlined by Al Val.

Cher at Scotiabank Arena: Cher performs in Toronto with special guests Nile Rodgers and Chic.

Humber Valley Art Exhibition: This guild from Neilson Park Creative Centre presents an exciting juried art exhibition with a mix of subjects, styles, and media by their highly talented member artists.

The Wow: Fax My Life: The Wow returns for April for an office themed comedy spectacular. Toronto's all-star sketch comedy collective gives you a uniquely themed full-blown spectacle every single month..

TUESDAY, APRIL 23

Gene Domagala's Toronto Places, People and Buildings, Including the Beach: Local historian Gene Domagala reviews Toronto places, people and buildings of interest, including those in the Beach.

The Bourbon Excursion at Jump: Kick off the evening with a welcome cocktail before tucking in to a four-course dinner paired with J.B.’s finest bourbons. Featuring homestyle fare such as Mortadella Lasagna, Tamarack Farm Lamb Shoulder, and Peanut Butter Baked Alaska.

#PitchItYork at Seneca College Newnham Campus: Showcasing York Regions brightest entrepreneurs, Open People Network has partnered with Seneca HELIX for #PitchItYORK! Pitchit is an interactive and fun pitch event to help entrepreneurs showcase their company to potential clients and angel investors.

RSI Leadership Dinner & Dialogue Series: To explore how trusted AI can advance and sustain the competitive advantage of your business and the markets you serve, join our AI-focused dinner and dialogue for C-suite executives.

Caméra Stylo Launch Party! The Cinema Studies Student Union's Undergraduate Journal Caméra Stylo is having their annual launch party.

Kelvin Wetherell at Cafe Mirage: Cafe Mirage Grill and Lounge presents Kelvin Wetherell on Nov 6. The performance runs between 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm in the evenings with a 15 minutes break in between. Cafe Mirage is one of the leading restaurants in Scarborough.

101: Cannabis: Canna-Curious? Learn your CBD’s from your THC’s and join us for a conversation on all things cannabis. Our panelists will be able to answer all of your burning questions: from wellness to entrepreneurship, to education and responsible use.

Hot Breath Karaoke at The Handlebar: Ridiculous game show style karaoke, with prizes.

Westway Christian Church Food Bank: The Westway Christian Church Community Food Bank is open for clients to receive food on Tuesday evenings from 5-7 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24

Fashion Art Toronto at Daniels Spectrum

Fashion Art Toronto is a showcase of contemporary and experimental fashion and arts The five-day multi-arts experience will inspire and intrigue guests through runway shows, photography exhibits, art installations, live performances and short films.

ALSO ON WEDNESDAY

Once Upon a Refugee: Chapter II - The Unrehearsed Plan: Once Upon a Refugee is a community education event celebrating the experience and contributions of refugees, hosted by North York Community House. The evening will have music, storytelling, food, and theatre.

Etobicoke Voters: Claim Your Right To A Vote That Counts! Fair Vote Toronto presents an information session on voting reform and Proportional Representation.

City of Toronto information session on aerial spray program for Gypsy Moth: The City of Toronto will implement an aerial spray program this spring in seven Toronto wards to protect the tree canopy and vulnerable trees from European Gypsy Moth infestation.

Blockchain Revolution Global: The first truly worldwide conference for blockchain in enterprise. Speakers include Imogen Heap, music maker & founder of Mycelia, who will also perform live at the EBA gala.

An Evening of Poetry Readings with Toronto's New Poet Laureate: Join Toronto's new Poet Laureate for a thought-provoking night of spoken word. In the first public appearance of his laureateship, Toronto's literary ambassador A.F. Moritz will be reading alongside three young poets at The Poet Presentation Centre.

Showtime! Disney Edition at The Drink: A live music showcase featuring performances by Aaron Bell, Michala Todd and Charlotte Ferrarei. This time they'll be serving you live Disney music.

Who run the world? QTBIPOC: A free drop-in workshop series on relationships for youth. Learn skills and connect with other 2SLGBTQ Black, Indigenous and youth of colour (16-29) at this Beyonce-themed workshop series on relationships-- with pals, family, partners and yourself.

THURSDAY, APRIL 25

In Her Voice: Amy Spurway Crow Launch

Please join Amy Spurway in conversation with author Emily Saso at Ben McNally Books as part of the 'In Her Voice' event series. They will be discussing Amy’s debut book Crow, followed by a signing. Books will be available for sale.

ALSO ON THURSDAY

Digifest 2019: Digifest is a three-day design and tech festival as well as a startup event, organized annually by the Digital Media and Gaming Incubator at George Brown College.

Leadership & Social Entrepreneur Knowledge Cafe 2019: Seminar of interest to entrepreneurs, professionals, activists and mentors for the next generation of leaders.

16th Albert Lahmer Memorial Lecture: Andrew Larsen: Join Toronto children's writer Andrew Larsen, author of The Man Who Loved Libraries: the Story of Andrew Carnegie, for the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books' 16th Albert Lahmer Memorial Lecture.

Art-Bound at Camp Tech: Have you heard about art journaling? Come and find out what the fuss is all about. The Art-Bound workshop is an introduction and exploration of art journaling.

Coco & Cowe presents Coco Con: Media: The second event of the Coco Con series. Catriona Smart and Halla Rafati will be joined by Vanessa Craft, Editor-In-Chief for Elle Canada.

Moonstruck at Bad Dog Comedy Theatre: By way of inspiration, its cast will take the details of one audience member’s dream to create a hilarious and magical show. Completely made up on the spot and never to be repeated, this show is sorta like a dream (no, better).

Cozy Fun Comedy Show at 120 Diner: Featuring: Velvet Wells, Sarah Ashby, Luba Magnus, Jesse Singh, Honey Bennett, Freddie Rivas, Desirée Walsh

RuPaul's Drag Race Viewing Parties: Fans of the hit reality television series can watch new episodes every Thursday at several spots around the city, including Apt 200, The Gladstone Hotel, The Beaver and Striker.

FRIDAY, APRIL 26

András Keller conducts the Royal Conservatory Orchestra at Koerner Hall

Hungarian violinist, Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra, and founder of the Keller Quartet András Keller leads The Glenn Gould School’s Royal Conservatory Orchestra.

ALSO ON FRIDAY

Metric with July Talk at Scotiabank Arena: Toronto-based rock bands Metric and July Talk perform in Toronto.

Fairlawn Avenue United Church's 58th Annual Book Sale: Shop for gently used books, DVDs, CDs, and LPs.

David Newland CD Release: Newland's CD release party will take place at Hugh's Room Live.

Toronto Lit Up: Mike Barnes: Join Biblioasis and the Toronto International Festival of Authors in celebrating the release of Mike Barnes’ Braille Rainbow: Poems through Toronto Lit Up!

Dinner for Vegetarians in High Park: Join us to check out the all-vegan restaurant The Goods. Everyone welcome. RSVP via email.

Acid x Untitled presents Justin Cudmore at Black Eagle: Brooklyn's rising star of the Queer techno scene Justin Cudmore joins Aeryn Pfaff and Ceremonial at The Black Eagle. Hosted by Miss Moço. All genders welcome. No room for discrimination.

Flashback Friday: A Time Travel Cabaret: Come witness the past, present and future like you've never seen them before through some of the cities best burlesque, drag and gender performers.

Redwood Comedy Cafe: A weekly comedy showcase featuring Canada's top comedians at the intimate Redwood Cafe in Little India.

ONGOING

Jude Ifesieh presents: 'Beauty in Lines' at Visions Gallery: Jude Ifesieh has developed a unique style, building complex images from a myriad of simple, colourful strokes and dots. His resulting works express the innate beauty of life and nature, bursting with healing energy, fertility and fresh possibilities. Runs until May 12.

Art Show & Sale by Marley Berot at Starving Artist Restaurant: Trini-Ja Canadian Marley Berot is opening her first show at the Starving Artist Restaurant and Gallery at 467 Danforth Avenue. Her acrylic paintings will stay on the walls until May 18.

VideoCabaret: Too Good To Be True: A dark comedy by the marvelous playwright Cliff Cardinal, who recently won Double-Doras, and an Edinburgh festival award for writing and performing Huff. Runs until May 19.

Next to Normal at CAA Theatre: Winner of three Tony Awards, Next to Normal explores a suburban household affected by mental illness. With a gripping story and a surging contemporary rock score, Next to Normal is a raw depiction of a family in crisis trying to overcome the past. In production until May 19.

PRECIOUS: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Jewellery: By creating precious artwork and art jewellery from everyday and discarded items, Micah Adams, Christine Dwane and Lawrence Woodford remind us that our world is shaped by the decisions we make. Whether disposable or sustainable, beauty is everywhere. On display through May 23.

Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World at the ROM: Explore the original exhibition through the eyes of curators Bryce Kanbara and Katherine Yamashita. Runs until May 25.

The post “ Things to do this week in Toronto “ was originally seen on toronto.com by Whatson

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ais-n · 8 years

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Hi ais! I've just finished re-reading icos and I once again feel so sad that it's over again. Do you have any nook recommendations or books that you like?

Aww thank you for reading ICoS the first time, let alone rereading it! That’s sweet of you

I could have sworn at some point I compiled a list (which I was going to link only because I have the worst memory and forget things I love whenever I try to list it all) but I can’t find anything! What the hey.

So, I made a list below the cut :D I broke it up between M/M, nonfiction, fiction, YA, and anime/manga. You should know ahead of time that I tend to read mostly manga or nonfiction, and/or I tend to gravitate toward “darker” stories or stories that deal with a lot of nuance and complexity. I don’t tend to gravitate toward stories that are really black and white (but idk about the ones I mentioned from when I was a preteen/teen because it’s been so long since I read them).

That may tell you if you might like any of these or not :) I wrote a little about the book by most of the names to give you a bit more of an idea.

Hopefully at least one of these looks interesting to you :) Let me know if you need links on something if you can’t find it, or if you want a bit more of an explanation on anything. Some (honestly, most) of these books I haven’t read in forever but others I periodically reread just because I

BOOKS BOOKS AND MORE BOOKS BELOW

**M/M:**

All for the Game series by Nora Sakavic - m/m, super awesomesauce series, it’s my fave in general. First book free, second 2 books 99 cents each. Nora was having some issues with the first book not being on the site with the rest so I put it on my site until she’s got that figured out, so people can still read the series. Get the first book here: http://aisylum.com/tfc/ and then I link the other books on there.

Raised by Wolves series by W.A. Hoffman - m/m, this one is a very different series and style of storytelling. I personally adore this series but it’s also the sort of thing some people may not be into for various reasons. But for me, I read the series all the way through and instantly started over and reread it all again. First book is Brethren.

**NONFICTION:**

anything by Simon Singh but especially The Code Book and Big Bang - these are nonfiction books and if that makes you go “UGH NO WAY” then know that Simon writes nonfiction like fiction so they’re really great and easy reads, plus you get lots of great info. Also, The Code Book is what I used as research for Jeffrey’s knowledge base + the whole thing with the message in Evenfall and the OTP comment. (If you’re like “Hey yeah what WAS all that about?” I answered it here.) (Also also, if you saw Imitation Game, then you should know that the Code Book covers at least part of the same history as that movie)

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (follows the story of one of my favorite humans, Paul Farmer who founded/co-founded Partners in Health which is one of my favorite charities) also Tracy writes other books that look intriguing to me but I haven’t read yet.

Erik Larson - Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, and other books by him – he, like Simon, writes nonfiction in a way that reads very easily like fiction. I like the way he interweaves various stories of various people into one book. Devil in the White City might be my favorite of his that I’ve read? Mostly because it combines architecture + America’s first serial killer + the 1893 Chicago World Fair and all of these things make me go YES PLX

Troublemaker by Leah Remini and Rebecca Paley - this is about scientology; I listened on audiobook–it was interesting and informative

Also, I listened to Dan and Phil’s first book (The Amazing Book is Not on Fire) on audiobook and that was also entertaining–although if you have no idea who tf Dan and Phil are, that may be less entertaining to you lol

Death’s Acre, or Beyond the Body Farm, by William Bass and Jon Jefferson - so, Bill Bass is super interesting, tl;dr is he’s a frontrunner in forensic anthropology, these books are about a farm people donate their bodies to where they decompose in various states to help forensic anthropologists learn more on decomposition which then helps in murder trials and elsewhere. If you’re into forensic anthropology, check out Bill Bass

Dismembered by Susan Mustafa and Sue Israel - this is true crime about a serial killer in Louisiana. It is, therefore, quite graphic and you should heed the title as quite accurate representation of what you will be reading about in the book. But if serial killers or true crime intrigue you, I really liked this book and have been on the lookout by more from these ladies. I thought it was written well and told the story well.

**FICTION:**

books by Jefferson Bass - there’s a whole series called the Body Farm series or something. Jefferson Bass is the combo if the two people for Death’s Acre, except that pseudonym is for their fiction series based on scientific reality/facts. It’s a pretty interesting series from what I recall but I never finished it. But if you like forensic anthropology and want to read a sort of murder mystery/detective type of series written by an actual acclaimed forensic anthropologist with all the science being legit, this is your series

Tony Foster series by Tanya Huff (starts with Smoke and Shadows) - ok so, Tanya Huff was SUPER nice the one time I messaged her. I like her a lot as a person. I will say that this series is not the actual best writing you will ever read–BUT Tony Foster is such a freaking great narrator that I love the series. Also, Tony’s a gay male which is always cool to have as a lead, especially in a sort of fantasy like this :)

Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman – honestly, just about anything you pick up by Neil Gaiman will be good. I’d have to reread all the books to say which is my favorite but I do recall liking Good Omens a lot, which he cowrote with Terry Pratchett. But Sandman is what got me into graphic novels, eventually manga (because I was used to reading GNs by then) and Neil Gaiman as a whole. I fucking love Sandman and will forever recommend it, but it’s a GN so it may not translate well to nook? idk

Speaking of Terry Pratchett, if you like stories that are easy to read and oftentimes have a fair amount of humor infused into them, I recommend him and probably any of his books but my particular recommendation would be Mort as well as the Sam Vines books. I think the first time we see Sam Vines is in the Guards! Guards! book.

Otherland series by Tad Williams - ok in all honesty, I never finished the series (got partially through 3rd of 4 books) and it’s been probably 20 years since I read them, so maybe my opinion would be different now. But Otherland was such an interesting sci-fi ish series which I honestly think is probably going to end up being somewhat realistic to our future. Basically, VR is a thing and people choose to live there instead of in reality sometimes, and now people are dying IRL because their bodies are wasting away and a diverse group of people from around the world get together in the virtual world to try to figure out what’s happening and how to stop it, but they don’t realize the politics and danger involved. Why didn’t I finish reading, you wonder? It’s because I read this series when I was a teenager when it first came out, and I think when I read reading the 3rd book the 4th hadn’t even been written yet. Anyway I was suuuuuper engrossed in the series–so much that when a certain thing happens related to my favorite character in the series, I was too emotionally affected by it I set the book aside to take a moment to reset my emotions before continuing, and then I just…. never continued…. ^^;; I got too distracted by other series but I always plan to finish it. Also side note, Tad Williams is a super nice author who actually wrote back to little teen me(!), taking my email seriously and encouraging me to write. Also side side note, Tad Williams wrote a bunch of books and I recall liking all of his fantasy series I read too but I don’t think I’ve read all his stuff.

Tamir Triad by Lynn Flewelling - first book: Bone Doll’s Twin. It’s been a while since I read this (as is the case for pretty much everything on this whole list) but I remember thinking this was a really interesting trilogy with a rather unique story, especially for the time this was written. If you ever read Lynn’s other book series (Nightrunner, m/m) then know that the Tamir Triad is set in the past of the Nightrunner world, by I don’t remember 500 years or something– also it’s written TOTALLY different than Nightrunner. The two styles are like night and day; if you don’t like the Nightrunner style, totally give Tamir a chance. If you do like Nightrunner, I still think you should read the Tamir books because I think they’re better, even though I did like Nightrunner in the beginning :)

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. This book is the inspiration for the wildly popular musical Wicked (which I also recommend you see because it’s omggggg

**YA:**

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer - for the most part, I quite like this series. It’s a very easy to read YA series that re-imagines the Disney Princess/fairy tale female leads into a sort of cyberpunk Earth with space adventure future. Most of the females in this series are pretty strong female characters, leading their own stories, having agency, not being overpowered by the male characters like in their Disney or fairy tale versions. It has kind of a Sailor Moon vibe in some aspects, mostly because Marissa’s a total nerd who loves Sailor Moon lol

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo - this is actually part of a series but tbh I liked Six of Crows more than the other book. Basically this book is a heist novel with young adult MCs. It’s a freaking BEAUTIFUL hardcover btw, like black edged paper and cool illustrations on the chapter pages and omgggggggg so this is one I recommend you buy in print if you like it, rather than just getting the ebook. It has an MC (Kaz Brekker) who I swear to god is like if early Evenfall Boyd and Hsin had a baby lol

Books by Sherryl Jordan - it’s been approximately forever since I read any of these books so maybe my opinion would change if I read them now, but back in the day I loved the fuck out of Sherryl’s books when I found them as a preteen/teen. I remember feeling like a lot of her female characters felt strong or at least I thought they were cool. The main one I remember liking back then is Winter of Fire. Mind you, Sherryl Jordan’s books are now really hard to find–turns out she’s a New Zealand author and a lot of the books went out of print at various times. But if you happen to run across one, you can check her out and see what you think. I mention her because her stories stuck in my head for 20 years.

Mage Heart (and the Chronicles of Dion Trilogy) by Jane Routley. Another one from forever ago–no idea what I would think of this if I read it today but I remember really liking it when I read it as a teenager, and the story has stuck in the back of my head since. I don’t remember a lot about the actual plot, just that I was inspired by the story/world.

Aaaaand that’s probably enough. You’re probably regretting asking XD

There are a couple of other books I remember from when I was really little but you probably don’t care about those lol The only one I’ll mention is Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede - that’s the first book in a YA series. I quite like Dealing with Dragons, but tbh I was really frustrated by the other books. You could read just the first if you wanted to check it out.

Lastly, if you like manga/anime at all, here are some other recs: fave anime/manga recs, plus here’s another good manga

#ask ais #book recs #book recommendations #Anonymous

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marjaystuff · 3 years

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Elise Cooper interviews JA Jance

Unfinished Business by J. A. Jance brings back the Ali Reynolds character. As with all her books Jance knows how to build tension and is a fabulous storyteller. This series, more than her other series, focuses and highlights the characters. In this installment there are three sub-plots: A new character, Mateo, has just been released from prison after sixteen years; a tenant who has anger management problems and sees everything as a humiliation; and Ali’s father who has dementia.

Mateo Vega will hopefully be added to the High Noon Enterprises team and readers can see his character grow in future books. Ali Reynolds and her husband B. Simpson own High Noon Enterprises, a computer security service based in Cottonwood, Arizona. Mateo was accused of killing his girlfriend, and though he was innocent, took a plea to avoid a life sentence. When the board finally paroles him, the only job available is working at a thrift store. Because he was a computer expert, while in prison he kept up his skills and decides to ask his former boss, Stuart Ramey, for a letter of recommendation. Stuart happens to work for High Noon Enterprises and is impressed with Mateo’s skills. Since there is an opening at the firm, Mateo is quickly hired. Just as he begins his new job, another employee goes missing.

The High Noon business complex contains extra offices, which are rented out to tenants for additional income. One renter is Harvey McCluskey, a crooked home inspector who's two months behind on his rent. Ali and her employee, Cami Lee, go to McClusky's office to serve an eviction notice, which Cami films on her IPAD. McClusky is embarrassed and infuriated, and vows revenge against the ladies. He kidnaps Cami and plans on torturing her. Needing all hands-on deck, they turn to the artificial intelligence Frigg who can hack into anything. This AI handles everything from background checks to strategic planning and can apply cyber-magic to tracking down Cami’s kidnapper.

While all this is going on Ali must also handle family concerns. Her father, Bob, has dementia, and her mother, Edie, is having a hard time continuing to be his caregiver. They tried hiding the fact that he's losing his memory and acting out. Edie is exhausted, Bob is depressed, and the couple have been isolating themselves. As the situation goes downhill fast Ali insists that her parents get help.

Serious real-life issues are addressed in this story. The characters make the story come to life and Jance does a wonderful job telling their story. Making a cameo appearance, speaking in the first person instead of the book’s normal third person, is J. P. Beaumont, the retired detective who is now solving cold cases. Fans of Beaumont will understand how his presence is only enhanced with first person narratives. This does not affect the flow of the story which is very fast paced.

Elise Cooper: J. P. Beaumont makes an appearance?

J. A. Jance: I have two publishers, the Ali books belong to Simon & Schuster, while all the other books belong to Harper Collins. One of the new characters, Mateo Vega, has a case that strands both Arizona and Washington. I thought, who better to help solve the case than my perfectly good cold case guy, Beaumont. I negotiated a peace treaty between the two publishers to let Beaumont visit Ali’s world.

EC: Even though the Beaumont parts of the books were written in the first person it melted into the story?

JAJ: I wrote in the first person, so the readers understand his point of view, where he is coming from and what he is thinking. The Ali books are written in the third person. I tried to write him in the third person for this story, but he said, ‘no way Jose.’ After a few days of absolute frustration, I gave up. My new editor at Simon & Schuster never read a Beaumont book and tried to change his voice to third person. The moment I read that part I realized he was no longer this living, breathing character but was suddenly a cardboard cut-out. I hope readers will give it a chance and see that it ties into the story.

EC: This is a character-based story?

JAJ: As I write a story I am always interested in the people, what makes them tick before and after this awful event that happened in their life.

EC: How would you describe Cami Lee?

JAJ: She has been front and center in several of the books. She is strong and partially based on my two granddaughters. These little girls started their lives in orphanages in China before they came to the US as adoptees. When I am writing about Cami, I have my two granddaughters tip toeing in the back of my mind. Cami is tiny but tough.

EC: You have a new character, Mateo?

JAJ: I am pretty sure he is a keeper. He got his second chance after being incarcerated for sixteen years. In future books we will see how he lives his second chance. He is remarkable, smart, a hard worker, helpful, and values friendships.

EC: How would you describe the Artificial Intelligence Frigg?

JAJ: When I was writing one of my books my husband suggested I write about an AI. Even though I knew nothing about it I wrote Frigg into a story. She started as the partner of a want- to-be serial killer. Now she is trying to conform, but still working outside the lines. After I finished Man Overboard, the book that introduced Frigg, I thought she was done for, but my editor did not want me to kill her. So, I had her switch her allegiance to Stuart Ramey who works for High Noon Enterprises. Now she also offers comic relief in the books. She does not have a good grasp of acronyms and they go over her computer head.

EC: How would you describe Harvey “Broomy” McCluskey?

JAJ: He was disturbing from the beginning. The reader knew the High Noon folks were in jeopardy long before those working there knew. He turned out that way because of his environment. His mother was mean; I based her on my parental grandmother. All three had anger issues, were easily humiliated, never took responsibility, and held grudges. I came to realize now how my grandmother influenced the writing of these characters. I did not see the resemblance between Broomy, his mother, and my grandma Busk until you asked the question.

EC: You have a quote in the book about dementia?

JAJ: You are referring to this one: “Lucid and rational one minute to off the charts the next.” I spent several months the last year corresponding with a woman who had to put her husband into a memory care facility due to dementia. She cared for him at home until she could no longer do it. She died six months after he did. The cost on the caretakers’ health is insufferable. I was thinking of her in the back of my mind as I was writing these scenes. Seeing what happened to Ali’s mom was sad yet realistic.

EC: What about your next book?

JAJ: It will be out about March 2022. Its title is Nothing To Lose, a J. P. Beaumont book. In an earlier novel, number fourteen, Breach of Duty, his partner Sue Danielson dies in an act of domestic violence. Her two young sons were sent to live with her parents in Ohio. But the younger son decides to find the other set of grandparents in Alaska. Now grown up, he has gone missing, and his older brother asks Beau to help find his younger brother.

THANK YOU!!

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wasilewskitbfrostzn64insura-blog · 5 years

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charly-ra · 5 years

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10 Examples of B2B Companies Using Social Media Successfully

B2B companies are doubling down on social media and it’s paying off. Many social media marketers feel like social media is an important part of their overall marketing strategy, and they’re employing the latest trends and available options. After all, Content Marketing Institute reported that 61 percent of B2B marketers increased their use social media for content marketing purposes compared with one year ago.

Decision-makers are using social media for business and for personal use, and it’s important to reach them whenever they’re online. When sharing a relevant message, they’re more likely to pay attention and consider your brands products and services.

Below are some examples of actual B2B companies on social media and what they’re doing right to connect with their audience and leverage social media in the right way.

Custom Images

TripAdvisor has a Twitter account that’s just for their hotel partners that have listings on their site. Not only do they do a great job serving the community of hotel owners and managers that want to connect with them, but they also have a very visually appealing Twitter profile. Almost all of the images they share or retweet are branded with their logo and “Certificate of Excellence” that reminds anyone viewing their feed that they represent the B2B side of TripAdvisor.

Oftentimes, these types of images aren’t difficult to create.

TripAdvisor created images for the winners using a photo from their hotel and then placed their logo and a few graphic elements that match their brand colors on top of it. This cohesive feel leads to a more professional appearance and also plays into the idea that they represent the highest quality hotels around the world.

As a hotel owner, it would be difficult to turn down the opportunity to be listed on TripAdvisor. The brand aesthetic (with actual photos from hotels on TripAdvisor) represents hotel quality and professionalism, something that any hotel owner or manager would be proud to be known for.

Tripadvisor just announced that Elixir Boutique Hotel located in Kalkan / Turkey received ‘Hall Of Fame’ award after receiving 5+ years of Certificate of Excellence award #tripadvisor #certificateofexcellence #halloffame #elixirboutiquehotel #kalkan #turkeyholiday #elixirotel pic.twitter.com/UbgogsOVue

— Elixir Hotel (@theelixirhotel) June 6, 2018

Note: On the flip side, there is something this Twitter account is doing wrong: Not Tweeting! You’ll see the last tweet was in Feb 2019, and before that, 2018. If you’re going to have a brand profile on social media, at least post weekly or monthly, at a bare minimum. Any fewer shows you don’t care about your connection with your audience.

Interaction With Community

One of Salesforce’s tools, Pardot, has its own Twitter account that is a good example of interaction with their community and industry influencers. For example, they run a series called #TrailblazerTipTuesday, where influencers share a video tip for the industry and it is retreated and shared by Pardot.

The perfect tip for the perfect solution. @danumbro has your back on this one #TrailblazerTipTuesdays https://t.co/wpBavp9Kss

— Pardot (@Pardot) August 20, 2019

This type of content creation is great for B2B because it not only shows that the company is invested and intertwined with their community, but that they’re also sharing high-quality content from people that their audience has probably heard of before.

Online interaction is crucial to a successful social media presence because it can help you grow your following and engagement overall. A large social media audience shows more credibility and respect in the industry.

Outside of sharing information from influencers, it’s important for B2B companies to also provide help and support to current and new customers that are asking questions or looking for company assistance. Simply scheduling out several different social media posts on a tool like HootSuite and then not checking for any comments or questions from the user base defeats the purpose of social media as a whole.

Think of social media as an online water cooler or meeting room where you can post what is going on with your company and also share information about others’ expertise and answer questions as a resource. It’s a place to make connections and build customer trust and loyalty.

In-Depth Content Creation

Verizon has a Twitter account that’s for their Verizon Enterprise division, which provides IT security and enterprise news for their large-scale business customers. Because this is a technical field, Verizon does a great job of sharing in-depth content that is directly applicable to their target audience. From sharing the latest news items about cybersecurity to how developments in tech influence telecommunication networks, Verizon does a great job of sharing in-depth content.

The DBIR shows that #CyberSecurity breaches can take mere minutes. Discovering them can take months. Learn how you can prepare and respond faster by reading our Verizon Incident Preparedness and Response Report. https://t.co/VJQVWBko6R pic.twitter.com/4c7clcGn8J

— Verizon Enterprise (@VZEnterprise) August 20, 2019

One additional benefit to their strategy is that the majority of the content that Verizon is sharing is content that they’re writing on their own website. This goes hand-in-hand with content creation and marketing, but to be able to create such in-depth content that can be shared on social media is a great benefit to B2B companies. Not only are you driving traffic to your website instead of external sites, but you’re also showing expertise in the field by authoring useful and descriptive content.

When it comes to sharing the right content, if your business has a highly technical audience, it’s worth the extra cost to have someone who’s more educated about the industry running your social media. Not only will they have a better eye to find content that is more in-depth and important to the industry, but they’ll also know the right hashtags and industry vocabulary to use in their messaging.

To have a social media newbie or someone who’s never worked in the industry before run a Twitter account such as this one isn’t the right strategy, as they don’t have the experience to truly interpret the information correctly across Verizon Enterprise’s social media profiles.

Great External Content Shares

As great as Verizon is at sharing their own in-depth content, it’s also important to share content from others in the industry. This has been touched on before, but there is an art to sharing others’ content in a way that I can actually benefit your brand.

Chorus, an AI sales tool for VP of Sales executives, does this well by sharing sales content that can help salespeople hone their craft and get better at attracting leads. Not only do they share great content from industry experts, but they also tagged the source where it is published on. This leads to a higher chance of the source retweeting them, following them, or even retweeting their tweet, giving Chorus more exposure to their audience.

This is a lot of upside for only one tweet!

Coaching Maturity Model: How to Take Your Coaching Culture from Good to Great https://t.co/ypDGMvOboA via @SalesHacker #salescoaching pic.twitter.com/9TnP1G5ey0

— Chorus.ai (@chorus_ai) August 20, 2019

When it comes to sharing external content, always try to share the source that it’s published on and the author’s username so they are more likely to follow or engage with your tweet through their own profiles. Many outlets and writers also appreciate their work being shared, which leads to a buildup of goodwill down the line.

For example, say you wanted to have a guest post on a popular industry blog. Sharing previous tweets from the past years or months where you shared their content shows that you have been a good steward of them and are likely to produce high-quality content for their website.

Think about it: If someone pitched you a contributed article and showed tweets from the last few years where they’ve shared your content in a useful way, wouldn’t you be more likely to give them a chance over a cold pitch that didn’t prove any past connection to you?

Humanizes The Brand

Sometimes B2B marketing is seen as cold or uninteresting. If you’re looking for a brand that represents the opposite and does a great job of personalizing themselves in their customers, Bench on Facebook is a great example.

Bench is a company that provides accounting services for self-employed business owners or businesses that have a small number of employees and can’t afford to have their own accountant on staff. These businesses may not have a full-time accountant but often need to have a professional accountant involved with their bookkeeping and invoicing so it stays straight and consistent.

Many of Bench’s posts on Facebook focus on the specific business owners or use cases where their services have been invaluable to their customers. By humanizing themselves through the lens of their own customers, Bench is showcasing how future business owners could be using Bench and how it would make their lives easier.

Another bonus feature that Bench does is to tag businesses that they mention in their posts. Similar to the previous example, this gives them more potential exposure and opportunities for engagement with customers or other industry organizations.

When possible, even if you scheduled the post on a service like HootSuite, go back and edit the post to tag the business or person mentioned. This is a unique touch that not many Facebook pages do, and can make a big difference in your overall exposure and engagement across other business pages.

Uses the Shop Feature

Obviously, you don’t have to sell a service like accounting to be a B2B company. A vast majority of businesses that service other businesses are selling goods such as office supplies and equipment. One such example is Wayfair Professional, which is a branch of Wayfair.com, an interior design e-commerce website.

To sign up for an account with Wayfair Professional, you have to have a business EIN. This entitles you to discounted rates and a dedicated support rep that will help you with any orders or questions.

To get their point across that you can get high quality office furniture, artwork, or other supplies for your business on their site, Wayfair has a separate Wayfair Professional Facebook page that showcases their available products that their audience might be interested in. This is done using the e-commerce shop feature, which allows users to view and browse products directly on Facebook. When they want to make a purchase, they simply click “complete purchase on site,” and in this example, are taken to the product page on Wayfair.com.

If you sell products or have product pages on your site, this feature is worth utilizing, as it provides another outlet for customers to see the products you offer and to make buying easier.

Double Down on Video

Google’s G-Suite LinkedIn page Is a great example of using video to reach B2B customers. According to CMSWire, LinkedIn is doing video extremely well. Because 80% of sales leads come from LinkedIn (according to a study mentioned in the CMSWire article), it’s important to be active on LinkedIn, if that’s where all or part of your customer base is spending time. Google includes links to their YouTube videos if they’re linked to post, but they play natively on LinkedIn, allowing users to stay on the site instead of having to go to YouTube to view the video.

Google G-Suite chooses to do video that promotes the opportunities and features of their services and also highlights industry news and development that make their products stronger. All of the videos are well-produced and in high-definition, which translates into a polished look that shows how much time and energy went into each video.

Even though these videos weren’t likely produced especially for LinkedIn, the ability to play directly on the site at such a high-quality makes LinkedIn a useful and enticing place to post any videos you may be creating for your B2B audience.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to social media for B2B, it’s important to utilize all the available options on the platforms you’re active on, as well as to post often. It’s not crucial to be on all social media platforms, but what is crucial is to commit to staying active and useful on the places where you do you have a presence.

Social media can be a great way to pull in new customers, build existing customer loyalty, and showcase expertise in your industry for customers and potential employees alike. Don’t be afraid to try new things as long as you stay in your authentic voice and are dedicated to being a valuable resource for your audience.

Featured Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash. Screenshot taken in August 2019.

from http://bit.ly/2HtSudd

#Digital Marketing

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