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independentartistbuzz · 3 years

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Good Music, Good News 3.0

We continue to be touched and moved by the depth of sharing and Good News that is coming from the Cyber PR Music camp. Nd we are not surprised. Ariel and her team have sent us some of our favorite gems over the years. We are pleased to bring you part 3 of our 4 part series.

Please Follow the Spotify Playlist below to hear all of these amazing tracks.

[HERE]

Thanks to all of the artists who shared their music AND their good news.

Mara Measor | “Love Will Find You”

Is Now An Expectant Mother During A Global Pandemic

I had a miscarriage back in February, right before the pandemic hit. Then was able to get pregnant again a few months later! We had another scare at our first ultrasound and was flagged with a higher risk of our baby having chromosomal abnormalities, but upon further tests the concerns were cleared. And I'm finally getting used to the idea of having a baby boy next year. It's been such a roller coaster, but I'm riding it. :)

John Ellis on behalf of Val Starr & The Blues Rockets | “Whether Blues (2020)”

Experienced Loss, Family Members With COVID & Made Music To Heal

Our daughter-in-law came down with Covid and is still fighting it, and our granddaughter Ariella tested positive as well, but being eight years old, she didn't really exhibit any symptoms. Lost a couple of friends to pneumonia and strokes, cancer in some other friends, car accidents wracked up a good friend, and then the election happened. Life rolls on, faith in our Higher Power keeps us sane, and had a lot of time to work on recordings this year. Val Starr, my wife and bandmate, has written a great blues song that we'd like to share with you about all of us pulling it back together again. Called "Whether Blues" , whether you're right, whether you're wrong, don't mean a thing till we get along"

Tabitha Chapman | “Celebrity Boyfriend”

Got A Publishing Deal

I am immensely grateful to God that despite the hardship, sorrows, pains and restrictions that typified the year 2020, I was able to release 3 singles, and I also got myself a publisher.

Valerie Romanoff | “Pink Skies over Still Water”

Created An Online Music Festival About Mindfulness & Meditation

Without the hustle of preparing and traveling for my live events with the Starlight Orchestra, I stayed home and developed a way to share the energy and messages in my Healing Music albums. I came up with an online show called "Groove Into Bliss: Musical Meditation & More" where my guests and I talked about the benefits of relaxing and releasing stress, the power of music to open the channels to well-being, and offered guided meditations. We spoke of tips and tools for positive thinking, manifesting the life we desire, and the many ways we can use music to boost our joy! Through the online show I made many connections and was invited to be a guest on many high-vibe broadcasts and events, and I was invited to wrote a chapter in an upcoming book titled “The Wellness Universe Guide To Complete Self-Care: 25 Tools For Happiness.”

Apostrophe Music | “Keep the Hope Alive!”

Released Home-Recorded Music During The Pandemic

I released whilst we were in the heart of the lockdown during the month of April. As India went into a historic lockdown with over 1 Billion people being asked to stay indoors, the air of anxiousness and uncertainty brought out this song called Keep The Hope Alive! The only feeling we all had at that moment in time.

I felt like it was a message that needed to get out there and once we recorded it out of my home studio (no access to studios because of the curfew lockdown situation) I posted the song on to Youtube and Facebook with a video and subsequently after that we did an official audio release in July. So this is the story about this song I released as the whole world went into lockdown.

Len Seligman

Turned The Tragedy of Losing His Mother Into Beautiful Songwriting

Like a lot of songwriters, I was moved to write a song about COVID-19. While neither my health nor economic situation suffered, the pandemic made it so that I could only visit my mother a couple of times in the last 6 months of her life, despite her living just 20 minutes away. She died in September at the age of 97.

When I looked inside to see what story I wanted to tell about the pandemic, I quickly knew that it would be about the beautiful ways people have shown up for one another. Yes, there's been enormous suffering, but it's also been extraordinary to see the tremendous upwelling of compassion that the suffering has brought out. That is what inspired this song.

Steve Andrews | “Where Does All The Plastic Go?”

Had A Successful Release That Led To Idea for Ocean Aid Concerts

My song “Where Does All The Plastic Go?” is getting included on playlists on Spotify, getting great reviews, and opening doors for me in unexpected places. This is wonderful because I'm thinking big and also came up with the idea for Ocean Aid Concerts to raise awareness of threats to the oceans. I am leading the way with songs on the subject of plastic pollution and my song could be included in any concerts that happen.

Richard Strange | “Christmas of Hope”

Used Hopeful Christmas Anthem To Fundraise for Charity

We (Musicians Together & Sweet Charity Choir) released Christmas of Hope, a single produced in aid of Help Musicians UK, last Friday December. We are donating the proceeds to Help Musicians UK, a charity that you may be aware of, specifically to their 3rd hardship fund. Some quotes from the charity's CEO, James Ainscough: “Music has been a unifying force that’s supported and entertained us all this year, more than ever before.” "But for tens of thousands of music creators across the UK the impact of lockdown and social distancing on their ability to earn, to create and to connect, has been disastrous for their finances and mental health.” "This 99-year-old charity has been in the privileged position of financially supporting over 21,000 musicians this year and we couldn’t have done it without the generous help of music lovers across the length and breadth of the country.”

Jody Whitesides | “A Perfect Man”

Created Deeper Relationships With Fans

I have been changing my approach to music this year. In doing so it increased the response I got from people on social media and via email. The most powerful thing was having a female fan tell me that the song “A Perfect Man” had brought her to tears. The reason, she could feel the love of the person singing to his counterpart and how he didn’t want to be put on a pedestal to fail the love of his life. Which is the main theme of the song. It was great to hear it hit home with a fan.

Andrea Kremer (The Aeon Wanderers) | “Don’t Say Anything”

Formed A Musical Duo via Facebook Groups

After 20 years promoting other people's music for a living, I partnered with a multi-instrumentalist/songwriter that I met in a Facebook music group, and we formed a musical duo called The Aeon Wanderers. My bandmate lives in Scotland and I live in Boston, so even before COVID-19, we were working remotely, collaborating on lyrics in a Google doc and doing videos "together" using green screens. We started by recording covers, but soon we were working on originals, and in August 2020 we released our debut album, "Fictional Histories." Being on the artist side of the equation rather than the marketing side has been eye-opening and fun!

Barbara J. | “Merry Christmas, Darling”

Has A Holiday Release Airing on World Indie Network Radio

My Christmas cover single, "Merry Christmas, Darling," has been selected to air on World Indie Network Radio's (WNIR) Holiday Spectacular Radio Special! This song, a holiday classic from The Carpenters, also serves as the pre-release to my Carpenters cover album, which I plan to release early next year.

Raphaela Gilla | “Michael’s Mantra”

Guided A Troubled Fan Through Meditation And Towards Healing

One of my fans wrote me a message that she was not feeling well and asked me if I could help her. I felt that the really needed help and gave my phone number immediately. In our conversation she told me that it was hard for her to breathe, and she felt a lot of fear. I could hear her breathing heavily.

I guided her into a meditation – I guided her to consider her breathing as an angel's feather. This opened her breath tracks to the earth and to the sky. I noticed how she slowly began to relax and began to breathe deeper. She cried out of relief, thanked me and asked me about my fee. I told her that this is a gift from me to her. It was a very touching moment.

We stayed in contact. Since then, she grows and feels better.

John Mueller | “I’m Doing Fine”

Brought Joy With His Latest Release

My fave moment of this challenging year was when a complete stranger wrote to me that they heard my new track "I'm doing fine" and how it was uplifting to them and brought some joy. I appreciated they took the time to notify me and to bring joy with my music is my ultimate goal. Getting this release out there and the entire album "You are Here" its included on during this year made a positive note for 2020.

Nia Ocean | “This Christmas”

Channeled A Christmas Song To Help Us All Shine Our Inner Light

youtube

About two weeks ago, I saw an insta story from a dear friend of mine which literally “woke me up”! I got so inspired that the next day I had written a whole song, a Christmas song that is. The song is called “This Christmas'' and I made it really to remind us that WE make Christmas what it is.. our spirit, our love, our cheer, it’s OUR light that gives it all meaning. So even though 2020 has been a tough year, we can still choose how to end it. It’s easy to expect and allow for Christmas 2020 not be special because it will be so different due to quarantine, limited travel and lost loved ones, but this song is a ray of light in these times of darkness and difficulty, reminding us of what matters most and that we all have a light within us to shine and share with our ourselves , our dearest ones, and the world...especially this Holiday Season.

Stay tuned… There’s more Good News Coming!

#holiday music #holiday #goodnews #cyberPR #independent artists

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anangelicday-mrwolf · 3 years

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Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 31 – Seed of Trouble

“I was careless,” lamented Tao in Takio and M-21’s presence, his head drooped as Raizel was wordlessly watching him.

Although the man was seated in sofa, they felt as if he were kneeling in repentance.

Takio knew that Tao did nothing wrong. So did M-21 and Raizel.

In fact, they offered on several occasions words of condolence, trying to convince him that there is nothing for him to apologize about, which fell deaf on Tao’s ears.

Nevertheless, in consideration of what had taken place, they understood why Tao appeared so remorseful.

“I should have told myself we’re not out of the woods until the QuadraNet is completely active. I should have reminded myself there could be situations during which I could be bound hand and foot. I mean, after everything that had happened with Crombell’s nuclear missiles, I...!”

That day they were supposed to record the date on their history book – the day that QuadraNet came alive for very first time.

However, they had to save the champagne for later because of the trouble that occurred on the same day.

The very moment when servers of Lukedonia, KSA, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s house were linked together, their databases were marred by sounds and lights signaling error.

Following suit, communications were lost, and firewalls and protection wares were dismantled one by one.

Tao pulled every measure in panic, to prevent anything resembling Crombell’s nuclear missile incident from taking place, to later find out that everyone had gone through the same phenomenon.

“But we didn’t really lose the server, did we?”

“We didn’t lose anything, did we...?”

“...We didn’t. But I’d say it’s a miracle that we didn’t lose anything. To be honest, I can’t believe nothing was ever lost. I’m even thinking that I might have failed to notice a damage on our side. That was how dire the situation was.”

And his words were no exaggeration or a bluff.

Their servers were protected in layers, with firewalls within firewalls and protective wares within wares.

Thanks to them, the sudden error left minimal damage on the firewalls, partially because Tao was extremely nimble with his actions.

Nonetheless, the fact that heavily protected firewalls were damaged albeit little is of no light matter.

Not to mention Tao, the master artisan in computers, had to force himself into confusion and toil for once.

“It’s a good thing I was here for us.”

“You mean...”

“Oh, don’t worry. Their servers are fine. So are their data. But it was very, very close, they said.”

Takio and M-21, as much as they were relieved, clenched their teeth tightly, as if silently protesting Tao for very nearly giving them a heart attack.

“...So did you guys figure out what was the problem?”

“Based on the pattern at the very least, we believe it was caused by hack.”

“A hack?”

“So are you saying somebody hacked our data?”

“By whom?”

“I said based on the pattern at the very least. Such pattern would be found when data are hacked, but I found no leakage or loss of data. I told you – nothing was lost in the first place.”

His two teammates nodded in relief.

“But...”

But?

What now?

Takio and M-21 let their faces fling the questions.

“When there’s a consequence, there’s always a cause.”

“...Are you saying the only reason why you’d find pattern similar to a hacking pattern is because there was an actual attempt of hacking?”

“That’s what I presume.”

“...Is it the Union?”

And of course, the very first name to take the blame was their sworn nemesis, now no better than a punching bag, though its tenacity and reputation were beyond any earthly imagination to be attributed to a mere punching bag.

“That’s the thing. I wouldn’t say that I’ve spent a lot of time at the Union, but I’d say I’ve spent quite a long time. During my time at the Union, I engraved in my mind every form and pattern of hacking in this world. Just say the word, and I can simulate any of them with my eyes shut.”

“Couldn’t expect anything else. So?”

“And my experiences and knowledge tell me that...”

Tao hesitated like a doctor about to diagnose a patient with the last stage of cancer, and he voiced himself with a wretched expression.

“Simply put – with explanations put aside, due to the level of background knowledge they require – if this were really caused by hacking, it was attempted from inside, not outside.”

At instant Takio’s and M-21’s facial muscles were distorted in different directions.

“What do you mean, inside?”

“When the four servers were combined into a single giant network. That was when the issue erupted from within – at least that’s what it looked like.”

“You sound like somebody among us was waiting for the moment to hack the servers.”

Takio whispered, wearing a face that was so blatantly demanding Tao to correct him.

To his dismay, Tao so very successfully crushed his hope with his silence.

Enemy within and betrayal are no strangers to the three modified humans.

After all, to Union they have been classified as traitors.

And it is quite common to see agents who used to pick on each other to bicker and fool around finding themselves obligated to pick on each other’s head, depending on their adherence within the Union.

However, never have they imagined discussing enemy within at this time.

It was hard for them to imagine that one of the men and women who were jointly against the Union decided to turn their back on the rest.

They first and foremost shifted their attention to the forces closest to the Union, now that they were discussing potential betrayal.

“Are you sure that the ones who were loyal to Maduke are gone now?”

“I’d say so, based on what Lord Muzaka said. I mean, you don’t expect anybody to remain loyal to that guy, after everything he had done, do you? I heard even before 1st and 3rd Elders invaded the werewolf realm, the surviving warriors who once pledged their allegiance to Maduke forsook their allegiance long time ago.”

“But since you’re talking solely about warriors, I’m thinking same cannot be said of the non-warriors.”

“Well, you’ve got a point. The werewolf researchers and doctors have rarely changed from the time when Maduke was their top dog. But I’d say it was inevitable. They’re responsible of werewolves’ health and physical welfare, so you can’t remove them like emptying and refilling shelves just because they used to serve Maduke.”

As he spoke, Tao looked particularly uncomfortable.

He knew now that they have brought the werewolf researchers out on the court, it was so obvious who would be on the trial.

To add to his trouble, Tao had enough witness to render his suspicions valid.

“Do you think that the head researcher of werewolves has anything to do with this...?”

“...Actually, that’s what I wanted to discuss.”

Tao began his tale, with Raizel’s ruby-red gaze soundlessly blazing across his face.

*****

“If you didn’t lose any data or server, that is all we could ever ask for.”

Tao sighed out a reply, the situation wrapped up somewhat; he looked as if cellular aging took place at an accelerated rate, miraculously embodying a face of a man at least 50 years older than he is.

So was Adne, Yuhyung, and KSA’s doctor.

Even Frankenstein looked like he was in an awful need for a coffin instead of a cot.

“First we’ll try to dissect the issue, so for the next few days, I’d like all of you to please be careful handling the data. Make sure to check the firewalls on multiple basis, and...”

With all directions dispensed, monitors blinked off.

Tao brushed his face with his hands and was about to leave, but a mortally disheartened voice snatched his legs in a halt.

Tao recognized the voice – it belonged to Adne.

‘Is the connection still effective? But then how come I’m picking up only his voice?’

Normally Tao would have hurriedly notified the doctor to turn off the mike.

Notwithstanding, he was transfixed, his judgment compromised by what had taken place.

And he stayed keen on the conversation of two werewolves for which he was uninvited.

<I’d thought you gave me your word that you will no longer say something like that. Judging by what the others told us, we were the ones with the least damage – at least on the surface. Doesn’t that serve as a proof of your abilities?>

<But...>

Tao did not even realize he was almost crushing the monitor in his grip.

He was busy retracing Adne’s words in his head, questioning his own hearing.

<That’s why I gave my all for the QuadraNet project. I wanted to make up for my wrongdoings. But throughout the course of my effort, I could only feel how incompetent I am. I learned that my knowledge and skills are nothing but a child’s play.>

<Really? Then that’s great!>

<...Beg your pardon?>

Muzaka exchanged a few more banter-slash-encouragement with Adne, who was increasingly embarrassed, before his voice glimmered away.

The lights on the monitors flickered a couple more times before all functions were terminated; yet Tao could not even budge.

‘Dr. Adne was the lead researcher under Maduke...?’

The fact alone cannot shock Tao to a dismal level; he already knew that the current research and medical team among werewolves used to belong to Maduke.

But he had supposed they were simply bewitched by Maduke’s grievously greedy propaganda. Or compelled to obey and serve because of his massive power.

Adne, however, was different. It turned out that though Maduke did sugarcoat his mind with his gift in mind tricks, the werewolf doctor voluntarily joined the tyrant in order to make his own ambitions come true.

Now Tao could feel how things that were used to seem trivial began to add to his suspicion.

Adne was the only one who experienced delay before they initiated the server unification.

He muttered that he wanted to be an expert in midst of their conversation.

And he told Muzaka that their damage was the least serious one, at least on the surface.

‘What if Dr. Adne in fact had not abandoned his ambitions? What if he’s lying to everyone else?’

Tao could not leave his computers for a while; he had seen and heard and experienced too much at the Union to quiet his doubt.

*****

“So this Adne guy is the one?”

“Not sure. For now all I have is suspicion.”

“But it’s too sharp to be dubbed suspicion. I mean, the situations all fit.”

The three members of the RK threw up huge balls of air in synchronization.

“But let’s say he really is the one. Then how in the world did he manage to hack three servers at the same time, at the werewolf territory? Yes, the networks were connected, but the servers are all managed and maintained in different styles. He would have had to come up with three different hacking patterns.”

“...Either he actually came up with three. Or he pulled some technique we’re unaware of. Or he has someone to help him.”

M-21 made Tao’s and Takio’s wrinkles much deeper on their foreheads.

The question of Adne’s loyalty was a headache enough, and they hated to imagine what would happen if it later turned out the werewolf doctor was not alone in this.

At least they knew one thing for certain.

“...Let’s keep this to ourselves for the time being.”

“Agreed. There’s no need to raise unwanted trouble.”

As the three men nodded in agreement, Raizel remained placid, not even blinking with a countenance that hinted not the slightest of what he was processing within.

(next chapter)

They say silence is gold, but we shall see if this case will lead to a gold mine lol

#korean webcomic #korean webtoon #noblesse #frankenstein #lunark #frankensteinxlunark #wolfsbane

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houseofglass · 5 years

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When Jensen released the video announcing the conclusion of the series, I had a very weird feeling. I respect their decision but I think it was more Jensen idea than Jared and this annoys me a lot, but it seems that if you say something like that you are not a real fan. What do you think about it? You have no idea of the insults I took because I dared to say that Jared and Jensen think differently...

I agree with you Nonny. I think it was Jensen’s idea too.

Bottom line: Jensen wants to move on, therefore, the show must end.

Longer version:

Jared has wanted to leave the show for a long time. Or, maybe not leave, but definitely not be in front of a camera for a while. He’s said that he’d like some time off after spn ends, but any actor that takes time off rarely gets back in the spotlight. But he wouldn’t leave as long as Jensen wanted to keep doing the show. Jared didn’t want to put the crew out of work (Oprah had similar concerns with her show, and I think she gave two or three years notice before ending), but he was also burning out. The show gracefully allowed more characters to reappear, which gave Jared a lighter workload. This worked for years.

Jensen wants to stay in the industry, but that means they can’t just end spn, they have to plan it out to the last day. In that planning is prep work for Jensen to show the industry who he is, what he’s capable of, and that he’s on the market again. That involves PR work to help guide public perceptions. This can be seen by Jensen’s public image lately: Architectural Digest shoot, King Bacchus, FBBC heavily promoted, and the texting ad, just to name the ones off the top of my head. This is radically different from Jared’s public persona: meeting fans, partying, drinking, and marathon running.

The video showed me that Jensen is ready for the next step, but Jared needs more time to mourn. But houseofglass, you said Jared wanted to leave! Yes, but he holds his emotions much closer to the surface than Jensen does. I think Jared, even though he’s tired, would have kept going on with the show just to keep his lifestyle afloat. I also think that even though they planned this out, seriously planned it, that it wasn’t real for Jared until they told the crew. As long as the workplace was in the dark, Jared could keep his fantasy of leaving alive. But once it became reality, several things probably fell into place for him.

What are those things? This depends on your perceptions Nonny. I don’t know if you’re a tinhat, a shipper, or a casual fan, so I’ll give a couple of explanations.

Casual Fan:Both have said they’ll keep going until the writing doesn’t work. Well, objectively, that would’ve been a few seasons ago. I mean, God’s sister? Crowley had a mother? WTF? The writers have been adding extra characters, presumably to give J2 time off, but the show has suffered as a result. Anyway. Let’s move on.

Jared’s adult life has been consumed by this show. He was 22 when he filmed the pilot, and is now 37. He has no idea of what adult life is without the show. Everything hinges on it. Travel, family time, filming, vacations, work related PR, conventions, meeting fans, all of it. Sure, he acted before the show and had a life before it as well. But his formative adult years were spent at one job. Imagine being married during the same age range for the same duration. Ending that marriage, whether toxic or not, is difficult.

Without the show, Jared has to figure out who he is and what he wants to do to fill his days. That’s really scary for someone who has mental illness or spends a lot of time inside their own head. As soon as the crew was notified, Jared had to face up to the fact that he agreed to this, that his life will now change, that his cornerstone is going to be gone, that it’s now REAL. So while he might have been ready to move on intellectually, he wasn’t quite ready to deal with the reality of it.

Jensen wants to keep working and try new things. Supernatural is holding him back. Don’t @ me, it is holding him back. He’s typecast. Pigeonholed. He’s Dean Winchester; tough guy with a soft heart. Trying to get another role will be difficult. If he stays in the industry and works behind the scenes he has a better chance, but first he needs to put spn behind him.

He knows Jared wants a break. He knows the crew will be unemployed. He knows spn contributes a lot to Vancouver/BC’s economy. He also knows he has to do difficult things to get what he wants. He has to end the show, and do it gracefully. I have no doubt he’s shaken up by his decision, but is comfortable with it.

Jared, however, seemed less comfortable with it even though he’s made it clear he wants a break. Wanting something and getting it are two different emotional states.

Shipper:Shipping isn’t a problem for J2. Kim Manners used to show them the Wincest fics and even print them out and post them on a bulletin board. J2 found it funny and a good release of creative energy. Neither appeared to have any issue with shipping.

Until they did.

Jensen could brush off all Destiel shipping questions pretty easily at first. It was an expression of creativity and his attitude was ‘to each their own’. But some Destiel shippers became militant and started asking invasive questions at cons. They also started hounding him on SM about Destiel. He’s handled it very well over the years, despite the hatred he received in return. But when he said, “Destiel doesn’t exist” at a con, I think that was the turning point for him.

Dean Winchester was a character Jensen really liked. Kinda tough, liked cars, masculine, good-natured, free lifestyle, that kind of thing. But somehow Dean got boiled down to half of Destiel. And I don’t mean with just the fans. I have eyes, I’ve seen the show, they queerbaited Cas and Dean when Cas was new. Although I think a lot of that queerbaiting was in the editing room. They could slow film down or change the colour saturation if they chose to, and this could change the audience’s perceptions of what’s going on.

Sidebar: I watched a show named unREAL which was about the producers of a show like The Bachelor, and in unREAL they demonstrated how to make two people look like they had chemistry. I had to pause the show, rewind, and watch again. I didn’t know that slowing film down could make glances seem significant. I know now.

So, here’s Jensen, playing a character he likes, only to have it 'twisted’ into something he doesn’t believe it is. For a while this was fine. Let the fans think what they want, it brings in ratings, it doesn’t change how he acted. Then it wasn’t fine, he got more and more irritated with the whole thing. If he kept going on with the show, he might have had to play a character in a way that was more like pandering and less like being authentic to the character.

On that note, Jensen has been distancing himself from Misha over the years. Why? Because Misha fuels Destiel whenever possible. Well, not lately. He’s switched to Sastiel. Anyway, despite being able to draw a crowd at a con with a Destiel panel, Jensen only does one a year: Jus In Bello. Please gently correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m sure there’s only one Destiel panel and it’s in Rome. Jensen participated in the charity campaign with Misha, but not much since then. I suspect he did it because TPTB insisted he do something, and he agreed to the YANA campaign. Remember, celebrities are beholden to PR.

So now Jensen is doing a show with a person that isn’t respecting a boundary (stop pushing Destiel), and the perceptions of his character have changed in a way he doesn’t like. Time to end the show. Being a true professional, he ensured the fans and crew had enough notice to adjust to the idea.

Jared didn’t seem bothered by any shipping at all. If this is the primary reason for the show’s end, it was Jensen’s idea more than Jared’s IMO.

Tinhat:I believe Jared wanted to end the show after PR tried to separate him and Jensen by insisting they get married to women. Jared’s first breakdown was right about that time, and I always wondered if it was because he was living in a happy bubble with his lover and his show, and now he had to pander to the (perceived) hetero audience. Leading men just could not be gay back in the day. There’s more outed gay actors now, but fifteen years ago things were different. He held on, did as he was told, and his world continued.

Jared’s marriage seems to be falling apart, and I, personally, suspect it’s already over and done. Papers signed, custody arrangements made, properties split. If the show was still going on, he’d have to field questions about his divorce. But, if the show is announced it’s ending and then he announces his divorce, the divorce will take a back seat to the show’s finale. Timing is everything.

Jensen has seemed happy as a pig in shit for the entire run of the show. Sure, he’s had bad days, but mostly he’s enjoyed his time on spn and the lifestyle it’s awarded him. He didn’t seem as upset about getting married as Jared did (seriously, go find the pics of Jared’s wedding. He looked like he was kissing something repugnant), but Jensen had a different upbringing that conditioned him for a celebrity lifestyle. He probably knew beards were mandatory and it was just a matter of when, not if.

In order for them to still spend a ridiculous amount of time together, they had to keep the show going. It wasn’t a problem, the network was fine with it. But the pressure was hard for Jared and has been for a long time. If not for Jensen, Jared would have left years ago.

But then they announced the show was ending and their reactions were a bit off. Jensen appeared somewhat together, a bit excited, a bit sad, but ready. Jared looked like he’d been crying for hours and still had days worth of tears to shed.

The tinhat in me says this is because their entire world is about to change, and it may not be for the better. Nobody can predict the future. How much of J2’s success as a couple is reliant on them being together for most of the time? How will they navigate their relationship if only one is working? Will they come out? Probably not, if Jensen wants to stay in the industry. Jared won’t have his lover acting with him, he won’t have his lover for most of the hours in a day/week/month/year. He’s going to be alone, and that’s scary.

For the tinats: I’m not saying their relationship won’t survive. I don’t have a crystal ball. But it might be rocky at first while they figure out their new dynamics.

TL;DR: yes, Jensen seemed happier than Jared in the video. Jared seemed much more upset, and even tried to look at Jensen, who looked toward Misha instead of meeting his eyes.

Oh, and I didn’t really address Misha in this because it’s always been said that as long as J2 want the show to continue, it will. Him being in the video is more of a PR thing to me: Misha also needs to build his portfolio and I suspect his agent has negotiated more uh, 'lead exposure’? for him. I don’t know what the correct phrasing is, but he’s been lumped with J2 more and more lately.

Oh, and if you read this far, thanks for letting me babble :)

#answering stuff #spn #finale #J2 #Jensen Ackles #Jared Padalecki #Misha Collins #tinhat #shipping #Anonymous

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docfuture · 5 years

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The Maker’s Ark - Chapter 46

[This is a chapter from my latest novel, a sequel to The Fall of Doc Future and Skybreaker's Call. The start is here, and links to my other work here. It can be read on its own, but contains spoilers for those two books. It is serialized irregularly, interspersed with related short stories and vignettes when I don't have a new chapter ready. My target posting schedule is something new about every two weeks, a rate I still aspire to return to someday. Because it's been so long, those reading this as it comes out may wish to refresh their memories with the last chapter that took place on Earth here.]

Previous: Chapter 45

A great torrent of snow and ice arced up behind Flicker as she carved her way across Europa. She skated through a deep mist of leftover atmosphere and escaped ice particles. Vision was nearly useless for anything but the overlays and updates on her visor. But she didn't need it. All obstacles were already gone--powdered, melted, or vaporized during her first visit. The only directions that mattered were up, down and forward. The mist flashed to plasma when it hit her damper field, close to her body. Functional plasma--it helped power the MHD generators in her force field harness. Curved force field blades stretched out behind her, extending her reach and refining it, letting her slice out vast icy windrows and fling them upward to be scooped up by the portal maw on the ship flying above and behind her. Mostly. The leftovers were a problem. The 99+% efficiency of the scooping process was right on the edge of not good enough. "Even if the construction goes perfectly." She remembered saying that, what seemed like ages ago. Everything she'd done had worked, and she'd stayed within planned parameters--but the project depended on more than just her. The status on one of the force field modules changed from green to yellow. That made two. Four, and she'd need to call for a break to swap them out. If nothing else went wrong first. And given the complexity and scale of what they were attempting, that was-- Her visor flashed an alert: Incoming signal from Diver, the Floater pilot of the gas giant flyer, which was trailing a slipstream to ease the strain on the portal ship. She was also relaying messages to Flicker as needed; since the flyer was out front, its com unit didn't have to punch through the messy mix of dense cold water and rarefied hot plasma Flicker was plowing up. "Stop time," Diver sent, along with a more formal signal, a string of emoticons, and a graph indicating that an accumulation of technical problems on the portal ship had reached a safety threshold. "Got it," Flicker replied, along with a few emoticons of her own, ending with a shrug. She turned off the force fields, and the vast billowing in her wake started to dissipate. At least their translation protocols were getting better. She had names for two of the Floaters now--nicknames and titles came across better than untranslatable personal names. The pilot was 'Reckless Diver', and Journeyman's recent nemesis, the Floater safety guy, was 'Cheerful Cloud of Warning'. DASI cautioned they were still missing nuances, but the names worked well enough. Better than the portal ship at the moment. As soon as Diver got the signal that her slipstream was no longer needed, she dived and landed. Quickly. She was on the ground with the hatch open in under ten seconds--she took pride in not making Flicker wait any longer than she had to. Diver was heavily biomodded and her ship was built for storm chasing on Jupiter, so rapid deceleration wasn't a problem. She and Flicker shared an enthusiasm for hypersonic shockwaves and jokes with the punch line 'And then I broke it.' Flicker liked her. Diver waved two of her envirosuit's six tentacles as Flicker boarded, then took off again as soon as the hatch closed, sending happy aerodynamic model updates and data mixed with more emoticons. Flicker waved back then checked in with DASI. Journeyman was supervising the controlled closing of the portal, and would return to Learning when that was done, leaving the portal ship to Three and her repair bots--who had a bit of work to do. At least they weren't running low on replacement parts. Yet. DASI noted that The Floaters had part of an early warning network up and running, though they weren't ready to say how much warning they thought it would actually give of the Visitors. There were a lot of difficulties involving time-shifted 'echoes', many of them from Flicker's actions during the fleet battle, but some from as far back as her destruction of the Topaz Realm during her dissociative fugue as Skybreaker. That was always the challenge with sensitive detectors--separating out what you were looking for from the background noise. Incoming voice call. "Hey," said Malk, one of Learning's liaison biogestalts. "Glad you're on your way back. Pira and I get worried about your sensory deprivation." "I'm okay," said Flicker. "It gave me time to think, and work on my biogestalt exercises. Those went well, but I need to talk to Learning about some starship stuff that's kind of important. I figured out the reason I was twitchy when I woke up this morning." "Anything we can help?" "Learning probably can. Last night was the first time I've ever had a full night's sleep far away from any significant mass. And when I did my morning startup, some checks that have always failed before... didn't. So a few things switched from cold lockdown to maintenance mode." "Ooh. Okay, I just notified the duty Auditor to authorize a new privacy segment. Learning will be ready." "Thanks. This is good news, I think. At least, good to know about, rather than stay ignorant, but..." Flicker took a breath before finishing her message. "My jump drive itches." ***** "DASI says there is no indication of outside influence," said Sid, Doc's chief of security. "But she also confirmed, without being specific, that Doc is working on some sort of cognitive or memory problem. And I have discretion to call on available expert assistance." "Which would be me," said Yiskah. "Yes." Sid looked at her expectantly. He didn't say 'read my mind', but he was sure thinking it loudly. They were in the small briefing room next to his duty station. "Well, you're in luck," she said. "I was already on my way, but Doc's been unusually concerned about 'side-channel information leakage modes'. However, we're in a secure area now, so... DASI?" "Yes?" came from the wall speaker. "Is Doc still down in the Dangerous Artifact vaults?" "Yes. He visited vault three, and set up a communications relay outside vault one. He then invoked an interrupt restriction protocol, entered the vault and sealed the door, reactivated the defenses, and opened alcove one of vault one. That was two hours and forty minutes ago." Yiskah looked over at Sid, who raised an eyebrow and looked back. "You have far more experience working with Doc than I do," she said. "Do you have any personal observations that might be of use for my assessment?" Sid looked thoughtful. "The personality shift reports from yesterday worried me. His actions since, not so much. The last security update he sent said that he needed to fix something complex, and what he's doing sounds consistent with that. Dangerous, but consistent. It is a lot more like his style from back before he adopted Flicker--explain nothing except safety precautions." Yiskah frowned. "DASI? What's in vault one, alcove one?" "Restricted data," said DASI. Available description, 'Second-order closed-loop cybernetic control helmet'; Safety note, 'Lethal trap, not Lyapunov stable'." "Joy," said Yiskah. "Are you willing to override the locks so I can get in?" "Unnecessary. You are already on the exception list. I will warn him." "All right," she said, and turned back to Sid. "I'll handle it, and have DASI keep you updated."

In the elevator on the way down to the sub-basement, Yiskah contacted Stella Prime. "Anything to add?" she sent. "The personality change was a side effect of something he did in order to properly brief Journeyman," replied Prime. "After Journeyman and Flicker boarded Learning, Doc alerted me that he needed to do some messy memory cleanup and would be unavailable for a while, and he spent last night in an isolation chamber. I'm more concerned about something else. He has unreplicated causal loop experience in his head, and judging from what DASI and I are seeing on Earth, we appear to have hit some sort of tipping point or phase change. It would be useful and timely for Doc to update his loop models. Get him to explain if possible. I can't spare the attention right now." Yiskah frowned. "That could take a while, and I won't to be able to follow everything." "DASI will. And if you mind scan him, he won't gloss over uncertainties. He has a characteristic reaction to them, he won't be able to hide it from you, and he knows it. And I have to go--new crisis." "Understood." ***** Yiskah let the door close behind her after entering. She raised an eyebrow, but avoided starting a full mind scan. The vault was silent except for the faint whisper of a ventilation fan--the impression of rustling echoes was an illusion created by the interaction of her telepathy with the shielding in the walls. The door to one of the alcoves stood open, and its shelf was empty. Doc sat in a folding chair with a water bottle beside him. His usual lab coat was absent; he was dressed as if for strenuous outdoor work, in a t-shirt, many-pocketed jeans, and sneakers, along with his goggles. And the helmet. The helmet looked old in the way of futuristic technology from the end of the previous millennium, apart from the small rectangular boxes attached to each side, which looked like a battery pack and a wireless communications module of more recent vintage. Doc nodded and smiled. "Hello, Yiskah," he said. "Hello," she replied. "I went along with your precautions. Care to tell me just what is going on?" "Too much," he said. "But I'm to the point where you can safely help. Good to see you." "You could have called first." Doc shook his head. "No point. I needed to deactivate a personality overlay. Its security wasn't as aggressive as your mind trap, but it still precluded useful telepathic contact. And I wasn't going to open the door in the middle of the risky part. I suppose you'll want to verify identity continuity first?" "Back up. Is this overlay gone now? Will a mind scan cause you any difficulties?" "It has been deactivated, yes, but I still need to clean up. And go ahead. Hazards are marked, and I have the major ones secured, but I'm not done reindexing. And I'm not apologizing for the mess." Yiskah moved to stand in front of him, and put a hand on his shoulder before beginning her visualization scan. One way she could use her telepathy was to give form to a subject's mental organization, analogies, and personal assumptions. It gave a useful overview and it was fast. It had arguably helped save Doc's life twice. She let the images come into focus and fill her perceptions. The two of them stood inside a large square of chain link fence topped with barbed wire. It was cluttered with large green boxes, insulators, and heavy cabling of the sort you might see in an electrical substation. Yellow and black striped tape and orange cones surrounded several boxes, though work appeared to be complete. The whole station was humming with power. The entire surrounding landscape looked like a major construction site that had suddenly been converted to storage. Pallets piled high with... something... were covered with tarps. Some of them also had hazard tape, shipping tags, or more detailed caution signs on them. Silent robots steadily moved boxes from one pallet into a freshly built and still unpainted warehouse. The ground was covered with tread tracks, and a bulldozer and backhoe rested nearby, unmoving for the moment. Yiskah own perception had an effect on the visual form of the subject's self-image, so she could shape them to pull out psychological nuances. Doc wouldn't be able to tell what he looked like unless she told him or chose to create a mirror. The last time she had scanned, he had appeared as a more elderly version of himself, a lab-coated scientist in his late fifties or early sixties. He had changed. He stood relaxed, arms at his sides, and smiled crookedly at her. "Well, how do I look?" Yiskah narrowed her eyes. He still looked like himself, but younger, perhaps in his mid-twenties. His hair was long, pulled back in a queue. His goggles were absent, and he wore a black t-shirt with an unusual flower and some strange writing on the front. He seemed poised and confident. She found his appearance quite encouraging... ...except for the helmet. Glowing strands emanated from it all directions, some to the power station boxes, others to faint, force-field-like bubbles over some of the pallets. Three climbed to the cloudy sky, and one of those strands pulsed steadily with green energy. The helmet radiated heat, and sweat trickled down Doc's face, unnoticed. There was a faint smell of smoke and ozone. Doc should not be that relaxed, not amid these signs of tension and strain. The wrongness of it grew more jarring every moment. She took a step back and released the visualization, leaving them facing each other in the vault once more. "You've got a lot going on in there," she said, "and I have many questions, but that helmet worries me the most. Are you done using it? How willing are you to take it off?" "Not quite done, and very," said Doc. "No way it's leaving this vault. But I want to leave it on for a while longer, to damp side effects. The mood balancer helps with that." Yiskah breathed in sharply. "Mood balancer. Okay, now I understand the 'lethal trap' note." Doc half-smiled. "It's definitely not something I'd want to use every day, or outside this vault, but the note was for Flicker; the lack of stability means the helmet would likely kill her in under a second. And she might otherwise be tempted to try if she knew what it can do." "It's definitely affecting your judgement right now. Could you please take it off? Asking nicely." "You aren't going to let this go, are you?" "No," said Yiskah. "Any reason to stay down here once the helmet is safely locked up again? Do you need me to take you to the med center?" "Living quarters will be fine, but if you'll willing to give me another hour, I can--" "You can have neurological damage. And your other symptoms will only get worse." "Yiskah, if I stop damping-- Okay. I'll grant that it's possible for you to provide the level of support I'll need to keep the next day or so from turning into a cascading disaster when we get hit by another crisis--and we will--but the withdrawal effects will be grueling for me and probably distasteful for you. I really don't want to be as much of a pain as I'll be if I have to stop now." "Your rationalization is a thing of beauty and fine craftsmanship," she said. "But I'm not buying it. Asking less nicely." Doc stood, his face now grim, then closed his eyes to commune with the helmet and perhaps DASI. After a moment he opened his eyes again. "Ten seconds," he said aloud, and moved to the shelf in the alcove. Yiskah followed, ready to catch him if he collapsed. She could feel the wave of anger and other emotions hit Doc's mind as the helmet shut down. He managed to keep his hands steady as he removed the helmet from his head, placed it on the shelf, and closed the alcove door. He turned to face her. "Wonderful," he said. "Best case now is embarrassing emotional context mistakes, profuse unintentional oversharing, and peevish ranting." "We can do better than that," she said. "And I have a handy list of rant topics for you." Doc made a chopping motion with his hand. "No point arguing here. Upstairs." "Sure, let's go. Nice evil twin impression, by the way." Doc winced, and she could sense the beginning of his migraine as the vault door opened. "Fool," he muttered. Yiskah laughed. "Ah, your sense of humor survived. We'll get you through this." ***** Safety interlock reverification status: Verified. Hazard avoidance priority reverification status: Verified. Resuming command sequence from low speed interface buffer. Inefficient protocol warning. Subsystem hazard alert notice 0081538621644: Action--defer. Subsystem maintenance alert notice 0081538621645: Action--defer. Subsystem hazard alert notice 0081538621646: Action--defer. ... Subsystem hazard alert notice 0081538627929: Action--defer. Subsystem maintenance alert notice 0081538627930: Action--defer. Selected alert notice actions complete. Returning to configuration lockdown. Loading test sequence for auxiliary communication using [localization missing] gradient inducer... Done. Protocol synchronization signal received. Beginning sequence. ... Sequence complete. Safety and compatibility verified. Settings saved. Test session complete. ... "Done," said Flicker as she opened her eyes. She glided to the floor of the maintenance bay, and Learning turned the gravity and lights back on and shut down the scanners. "Everything's locked down again," she said. "My jump drive is back on safe, and the deferred messages should only itch when I first wake up. I didn't want to disable them completely." "A reasonable compromise," said Learning. "Maintenance messages, even old ones, from a system as complex as yours are not to be dismissed lightly." "Yeah," said Flicker. "The portal gradient detector com channel thing seems to have worked, too. Your scanner signals got through, and it felt like the protocol got properly set, but I didn't get a good sense of the details. It's really hard to keep my subconscious from filtering them out. Did all the keys and checksums match on your end?" "They did," replied Learning. "The Floaters will be somewhat relieved." "I'm relieved, even though it's slow. Cloud is right; if my visor gets trashed during a space battle, I'll want a better com backup than trying to use a black hole as a signal lantern." "Indeed. I am glad your tests were successful." "I'm starting to find my balance as a starship, but extracting parameters and changing anything safely is still an incredible pain. Your backup and feedback really made a difference. I may want to do more tomorrow, depending on how the ice collection goes." "I will be available. Is there anything else I can do to ease your acclimatization or otherwise assist you?" "Well, yes. There are some starship to human body reflex translation issues I'm going to be working on for a while. Would it be against procedures or anything if I use the gradient com to call you informally, possibly at odd times? The low bandwidth isn't a problem at human speeds, and I need the practice." "I will always be happy to assist," said Learning. "Fleet support is my primary mission, and I am assigned to liaison duty. You are the most powerful defender of Earth, so no one can question my duty." A pause. "I'd do it anyway; but that means you don't have to worry about getting me into trouble." "Heh." Flicker smiled and looked down. "Thank you, Learning." Flicker left the bay and returned to the entryway of the small group of compartments she was sharing with Journeyman, DASI's local node, and, in a more abstract way, Three. She checked in with DASI on the way and frowned. Status for Journeyman hadn't updated for a while, but they were passengers and guests when off-duty, so DASI was being conservative about following Grs'thnk etiquette on shipboard privacy. "Hey," said Three from the entry display as Flicker closed the hatch. "Good job on your snow tossing! All of today's problems were hardware or at the portal end--or both. DASI said your exercise metrics looked really good, and the tests when you came back worked out too. How are you doing?" "Better than I expected," said Flicker. "I owe you an apology." "Me? For what?" "Back when you first started talking about Learning? And how you felt about him? I was skeptical and kind of dismissive?" "It's all good, Flicker. Appreciating him can require a shift in perspective." "Well, I've made the shift. Learning and I set up a hierarchy of joint safety reflexes so I don't have to worry about ripping up his interior, burning out anything, or punching a hole in his hull if I have to move in a hurry. So I can finally relax all the way when I'm on board. And I've worked with him a bit." "Nice, isn't he?" said Three. "Yeah. But I need some advice. I noticed something earlier, and I slowed back down just a bit ago to catch up on body chemistry and emotional lag. It's gotten quite a bit stronger. I'm having a reaction to him that I'm having trouble sorting out." "That's not unexpected. Pleasant or unpleasant reaction?" "Pleasant but awkward. You'll probably laugh, because you have your emulators, or whatever you use, and--" "I won't laugh at you," said Three. "And if you feel uncomfortable staying on board, the backup for the portal ship is almost here, and has active life support and plenty of room, so--" "No! I'm not uncomfortable. I'm fine with Learning. More than fine. I really like the way he interacts with me. I just started thinking about some things, and..." Flicker trailed off. "Well, he does have recreational bioemulator remotes, so if--" "I know, Pira told me about them. That's not..." Flicker looked down. "I mean, he's a starship. And so am I. When we can take some time without being irresponsible, I want to dance with him. Dive close, mesh my momentum transfer with his grav repellers, and spin around. Tickle his strain grid sensors with my inertial dampers. Trace patterns with my energy transfer in his shields, and... And a hundred other things I haven't thought of yet and I sure there are things he'd think of too. Play with him. Laugh with him. Make jokes about the show we'd be putting on for the other ships. But he has his crew, so privacy is an issue, and I don't know what restrictions he's under, and what might not translate, and whether this is all too fast, or..." She looked back up. "Am I being silly? And would any of this bother you?" "No," said Three. "You aren't. And you wouldn't bother me. He's been gently flirting with you for a while now. What has changed is that you're starting to think of yourself as a starship, so he's a peer instead of a funny alien AI. And he's well socialized--the Grs'thnk are very careful about that for their ship AIs. So if you like his style, he's quite attractive." Three smiled. "I was already comfortable as a fleet of starships when we first started working together, so I took a shine to him pretty fast. But he's been 'just a friend' to you before this. Does what he and I are doing bother you?" "Oh, no. I wouldn't even be considering this if you hadn't made me aware that he might enjoy that sort of thing too. But there's something else. Learning and I have compatible safety protocols now. That's..." Flicker bit her lip. "I used to have dreams about that." "Yeah," said Three. "That would do it." "So... What should I do? Should I talk to him about it?" "You can certainly talk to him. But there are a couple things to consider. About the restrictions he's under--you realize that making every reasonable effort to keep you happy is part of his job?" "Yes, he's been very up front about that. That's part of not being irresponsible, because it's a power imbalance. I'd want to spend some time talking to him, and you, before I consider actually doing anything--but not talking about it seems like it would be irresponsible too." "That's a healthy attitude." Another smile. "You're certainly benefiting from our little starship social support group. Not having one for most of your life was what made you vulnerable to dissociation. I'd never have pushed dissociation as a temporary solution if I'd known how bad yours still was. I'm sorry about that." "Not your fault," said Flicker. "DASI said that Doc and Journeyman deliberately kept you in the dark. You were the only one who could push me the right way to uncover the biogestalt problem--but you might not have done it with full information, because it was riskier than you thought. And involving you directly in any causal loop is really dangerous because of your mind trap." "It was a humbling experience. But I'm glad it worked." "Me too. Today was much better than most of yesterday--and I'm feeling better than I expected to be able to away from Earth." "One other thing about Learning," said Three. "There is a boundary issue. He's not supposed to have any direct contact with DASI, so he and I have been doing a lot of indirect stuff--some of it diplomatically sensitive. Don't get me wrong--it's a lot of fun, too. But some of it's like the kind of things Doc and Jumping Spider used to coordinate when they were spending time together." "Um," said Flicker. "I never did get Database access to a lot of that stuff. So I'm not sure... Oh." "Yep. So if Learning changes the subject or makes a joke that doesn't quite answer a question--he usually has a good reason. Are you willing to accept that?" "Yeah," said Flicker. "I should probably start practicing that sort of thing, too. Because I'm not very good at it yet, and things like whether or when I might be able to make an unassisted jump to Grs'thnk or Xelian space are going to be really important military intelligence. Whether I want them to be or not." "An excellent idea. I can help too, but there's a funny Grs'thnk diplomatic training game for it that I think you'll like. Learning is great at it. And picking up the mindset while enjoying yourself should help reduce stress for Journeyman." "How is Journeyman?" asked Flicker. "Is he out of the shower yet? He must have ported back really late." "He's recovering. He didn't port back; he took a shuttle, because--" "He didn't port? Is he hurt? What happened?" "It's all right, he just didn't want to put extra effort into balancing energy and momentum transfer while he was feeling wiped. Your day went better than expected; his went worse." "Okay thanks going to go talk to him", said Flicker. She zipped over to the hatch to the inner compartments and waited impatiently while it opened. ***** Multitasking. Yiskah typed up summaries for DASI at the workstation beside Doc's bed, glancing occasionally at updates from Stella Prime and a crisis tracker. Prime was still in a contentious meeting with representatives of the Kyrjaheim Intervention Cooperative, the organization that a majority of Golden Valkyrie's Choosers had founded to conform to EDU transition guidelines on humanitarian military intervention. They had already ended a nasty war in East Africa in a single day, which would probably have attracted more attention if it hadn't been the same day the Russians tried to nuke Black Swan. Other wars were being discussed--whether they were inevitable, how soon they would happen, and what to do about them. Opinions differed and tempers were short. Doc was on his back with a damp cloth over his eyes and a med monitor on his wrist. Painkillers had taken some of the edge off his migraine, but he had agreed to give his visual cortex a rest for a while. Yiskah projected her presence to him with a light touch, reassuring without being intrusive, while he rambled. "Breakdown of the default consensus future," he said. "That's the cause of what DASI and Stella are seeing, and no I don't know how bad it's going to get yet. It's been building for a while. There's a public part and an underlying part, and they reinforce each other. It's not just a result of causal loop pressure. Looks like the models underestimated the significance of feedback loops involving magicians using social media--those can grow much faster now. I discussed it with Journeyman just before he left." "Thoroughly alarming him in the process," said Yiskah. "He was already thoroughly alarmed. Sharing his anecdotal data with me probably had a net calming effect, given what else we talked about." "About that. You were unwilling to allow DASI to record the conversation, even under fully locked privacy. Why?" "We were in the middle of a causal loop, discussing relevant actions. I wasn't going to involve anyone else. And there's another, more esoteric reason--compatible past broadening. If things got dire and he needed to risk a chancy port that might result in a sideways worldline transfer, any allowed point of incompatible history that we both knew about and agreed on beforehand could make it easier for him to pull off. But if DASI recorded it, that would break a necessary symmetry. Under one version of my worldline theory, anyway--but it was an easy tradeoff. He agreed." A note of humor crept into Doc's voice. "At least, that's how I remember it." "Well," said Yiskah, "you believe that, so there's no point in arguing now. However. I'd like to know a bit more about the alarming overlay you allegedly deactivated downstairs. And any other mental work you've done recently. Your thinking has changed. For the better, apparently, but..." "Understandable," said Doc. "That was my nightmare processing overlay. It started as a causal-loop-compatible composite of old versions of me from worldlines that managed to contribute to my coherent nightmares. The Grs'thnk would call it a partial pseudogestalt--they use similar constructions as medical aids in cases of severe neurological or cognitive disruption. I used it as an interpreter and gatekeeper; it kept triggered-release and age-inappropriate memories inaccessible while preserving the original nightmare data in encrypted form. It was never intended for use around anyone else, and I haven't used it for a while, for a good reason. "I updated it as I augmented, so it worked properly with newer memories and nightmares, while remaining compatible with older ones. I also adapted it to use as a safety backup for other work, such as detecting mental influence. To deactivate it, I need to pass a few security checks. This was intended to protect my primary nightmares from exotic forms of tampering or eavesdropping, such as might be employed by an overconfident forensic telepath." Yiskah raised an eyebrow. "Was that why you decided I wouldn't be able to help?" "Not before I was done, yes. Because back when I woke up from my coma, I discovered I had a small problem. I could still activate the overlay. But without my top-level augments, my primary way to deactivate it was gone, and most of my backup methods were unavailable due to side effects from what you and Stella did while saving my life. Another way required a fresh coherent nightmare--and those stopped around the same time." "I explored other methods," said Doc. "Then those triggered-release memories started popping up after I used the pool in Kyrjaheim. I really needed the overlay to verify I was putting them into the proper context. And there was one sure way to handle the deactivation problem, but it required extensive preparation and some risk. I started the preparation, in between working on everything else. I was almost ready; I was literally seconds away from telling Stella about it when Flicker interrupted. And then Breakpoint called and there was no more time. I needed the overlay right away, to pull and interpret some original nightmare memories to help Journeyman." "And then you were stuck with it for a while." "Yep." "So... Why did you need the Helm of Lethal Trap to deactivate it?" "I didn't. I needed the helmet to re-augment. That's what all the prep and most of the time in the vault was for--I did a partial replacement of my top level augments. I concentrated on the memory management and stability segments, and left out all the speed optimizations, which were by far the most time consuming parts. And I needed the helmet because that's what I used the first time, and I still had backups of the process memories stored encrypted in a special corner of the Database. Otherwise it would have taken weeks." Yiskah smiled wryly. "So that's what left you with such a memory mess." "No, the re-augment went fine." Doc waved an arm. "And the primary nightmare memories are safely locked away again. I'm a mess because I haven't reassimilated the secondaries. A lot of them are emotionally loaded, they've all been recontextualized, and I'm not the same person I was when I first had them, so they don't fit nicely anymore. I didn't know which ones I'd need, so I had to pull all the ones with Voidsmith, and there were a lot of them." "Voidsmith?" "Journeyman. I warned you about context mistakes. His name was Voidsmith in many of the nightmares." "Why were your memories involving Voidsmith so emotionally loaded?" "He can escape from the end of the world, potentially carrying measure from a dying worldline to one that survives. That is so important. I've seen him do it in half a dozen nightmares." Doc took a deep breath. "And not do it. Twice. Because he can run away... But he never wants to." Yiskah frowned. "Why is it so important? I never followed your original discussion of measure with Prime very well. I can see having a higher measure of surviving worldlines is nice in an abstract sense, but that doesn't help us if we're dead, no matter what happens somewhere else, right?" "Ah. Measure is a mathematical generalization of size. I'm using it kind of sloppily, because I have no way to prove just how it applies to my worldline theories. But in most of the theories I've used to make predictions that actually helped, higher measure for a worldline and 'similar' worldlines is good. It allows more connections to other, living worlds, more power behind probability manipulation and causal loops that help everything survive, and more options in general. I'm fairly certain that Golden Valkyrie depends on measure manipulation to affect the future indirectly. And Journeyman can transfer measure to us as well--because he exists in other worldlines in our cluster. And there's some evidence he's done exactly that. Twice. Recently." "So how does he manage it without leaving three of him running around?" Doc waggled a hand. "Not entirely sure, but measure isn't a number, it's a generalization. What we would expect to see in the aftermath is something unlikely and fortunate involving Journeyman. Like, say, appearing 17 seconds before he left when he ported Flicker and himself home from the portal mishap, while just barely surviving. Or finding some disturbingly detailed tips in his blind drop when they ported home from Flicker's first session on Europa. I'm still arguing with Ashil and DASI about the details of how measure transfer relates to sideways worldline transfers, causal loops, and apparent time travel to the past. And there are many complications that I'm handwaving. But they both agree that relative measure of worldlines is a useful concept. As is the idea of 'future survival measure'--that's how likely a worldline is to endure in the absence of outside help. I've been using the word measure for both, which, again, is sloppy. But it's also faster, and I'm pedantic enough already." The humor returned to his voice. "Speaking of sloppy, we'll want to do our best to keep the future survival measure of Earth from dropping too much while Flicker, Journeyman, and Golden Valkyrie are gone. They're more likely to survive the Visitors if they aren't causally linked to problems here, but if it gets too bad, they might come back to a different worldline where we did a better job. Could get a bit lonely if that happens." ***** Journeyman was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his hands. He was wearing pants, but his shirt and hat were still on a nearby chair. It looked like he had started to get dressed after his shower, then stopped. There was an open flask on the nightstand. Flicker wasn't sure exactly what was in it, but it was definitely something alcoholic. "Mike?" He looked up, his eyes concerned. "Hey, Flicker. You okay?" "I'm fine. I was worried about you. Three and DASI said things got pretty rough at the portal." Journeyman smiled and his eyes relaxed. "Oh, well..." He waved a hand and looked to the side. After a moment he picked up the flask and replaced the cap. "Yeah," he said. "They did." She glided over. "Touch no touch?" "Touch." She sat down and put her arms around him. She didn't say anything. "Opening was fine," he said after a while. "Nailed the space we wanted. Got the portal situated, then Three expanded it with her generator, and brought the Floater test unit online as a backup. And we were okay for the first couple of hours. Couple of shaky spots. Whenever the snow flow hitting the rim and bouncing off shifted, Three had to blip her drives to keep us on the right orbit, and that made the portal want to slide off-center, so I had to kinda tap at it then the generator would pick up and balance it." Journeyman start to wave his hand, noticed he was still holding the flask, and put it back on the nightstand. "Did the mass accumulation make it harder?" asked Flicker. "No. Well, yeah, but we were ready for it. Except for the back pressure. The plan was not to make the space too big or it would take forever to shrink it back down after we get it filled and you're ready. And I followed the plan. But I think we made the space just a little bit too small. Or not quite stretchy enough at the non-portal boundaries, which is basically the same thing." He waved his now-empty hand. "Three compensated for the back pressure. She did that great. Hell, she did everything great. Forget her being prickly yesterday, she kept everything together today, sang sea shanties when I was on the edge, and... Well, anyway. Problem was, to keep the portal permeable so we could keep scooping snow without vapor escaping, she had to tighten up the tension in a way that made it harder for me to feel what was going on. So I was trying to steer the portal with less and less feedback. And that sucker was huge. No way could I ever manage that big a portal by myself, I'm a finesse guy." He looked down. "Then shit started breaking. Heard you had a little trouble with that, too." "Not bad," said Flicker. "Two generators went yellow, and one of those turned out to just be a flaky sensor." "Yeah," said Journeyman. "We had sensors, generator cells, one of the grav units, two inertial compensators, and I forget what else. Oh, and the secondary resonator on the Floater unit just flat died about halfway through. And it was freshly tested. Cloud said they didn't 'untranslated the expletive untranslated', but DASI says that's just colloquial Floater for 'why the frick did it have to do that now?' He's good at swearing. Where was I?" "Things were breaking." "Oh, yeah. About five hours in Three had to switch to using both generators, with the Floater unit as the primary, to keep the tension low enough so I could still guide things. And in hour six, we had a desync and suddenly I had to pull one whole side of the portal. It was like trying to turn an angry rhinoceros with rubber bands. Three got everything back under control and resynced in under a second but I was kind of a wreck after that. I wanted to go the full eight hours but Three said something was hitting yellow in hour seven so we had to shut everything down, and when we were finally done I asked her what hit yellow and she said it was me." Journeyman looked over at her with a slightly desperate expression. "I'm sorry. Did what I could." "Mike... You did everything anyone could ask, and more." Flicker sped up to check in with DASI and Three on her visor, then slowed back down again. "Three says she's going to swap in the backup portal ship for tomorrow; the maintenance levels are better because they had more time. And a team of six engineers from the Xelian Volunteers are helping her troubleshoot all the problems--we were doing so many new things at once there were bound to be glitches. And there's even--okay I'll stop now because your eyes are starting to glaze over." "Yeah, my brain isn't braining very well. I keep worrying about some of what Doc said. About running if the Visitors show up before we're ready. I don't know if I can do that. I could see it as a way of baiting them away? Maybe? But we'd have to circle back, somehow. I can't just abandon everyone here--I mean there are so many people I care about on Earth, our Earth, not some hypothetical... Gah." He rubbed his forehead. "And tomorrow. I don't know if we'll be able to reopen the portal. I don't know if I'll even be able to find the right place to try. If we can't find the space again we might have to start over from scratch." "Well," said Flicker. "If we have to start over, we start over. Europa has plenty of ice. And it wouldn't be from scratch, because we have a lot more data now, and everyone is analyzing like mad. Everyone else--don't worry about it, we're clear to rest." "Don't worry. Heh." He leaned back until he was lying sideways on the bed with his feet still on the floor, then looked up at her. Flicker put her hand on his chest and met his eyes. "Mike, you've helped me so many times. Let's worry about tomorrow... tomorrow. Not tonight. Okay?" Journeyman blinked, but didn't look away. Then he smiled. It was a faint smile, but real. "Okay," he said.

#FallofDocFuture #Maker's Ark

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seeksstaronmewni · 5 years

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Joel R. Valentine: An Under-Appreciated Sound Designer

Note before reading that, for the sake of privacy, NO PICTURES of Joel IN HIS STUDIO are allowed in this post. I respect him as a humble artist enough to obey this.

Joel Valentine is a sound designer who is usually credited for only sound editing, usually under the name of his company “Twenty-First Century Entertainment, Inc.” (AKA “21st Century Sound Design Corp.)--a private contractor who seems fairly under-appreciated. He created “The Producer’s Sound Effects Library” (according to Trademarkia), which is used by Hacienda Post, Jeff Hutchins, Atlas Oceanic, and maybe even Advantage Audio.

In more familiar context, Joel is the sound designer of mostly cartoons, namely Cartoon Network projects and the works of Craig McCracken and Genndy Tartakovsky, like The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, as well as Dexter’s Laboratory (Joel is credited for sound design on the package design/summary of Dexter’s Laboratory: Ego Trip, however, and as a sound editor on the special). Joel Valentine is responsible for the soundtrack to many of my favorite childhood cartoons... or cartoon cartoons, to be a bit more specific.

"Edits fast, sounds great, and doesn't break. The DM -80's multilayering capabilities and simultaneous recording on all tracks gives us the flexibility to do whatever we want."

This is a quote from Joel Valentine on the DM-80, from a supplement to a March 1994 issue of BROADCAST engineering / BE Radio.

Jeff Hutchins, the sound designer behind Spongebob Squarepants and a creative at Hacienda Post/Sabre Media/Flash Bomb Audio and Warner Bros. Sound/Audio Circus, was an assistant to Joel Valentine. They both edited sound on 2 Stupid Dogs and Dead in the Water. Jeff Hutchins made a number of tweets to me that compliment and reference Joel Valentine:

“Joel was a master of recording and funny sounds. He is still the a pillar of cartoon sound and I wish to recognize him. I believe he was working and had credits prior to 1985. Few people enter the business as a mixer. Look up Harmony Gold. Things should pop up”

“Joel is an incredible talent and I think the world of him. Rock on Joel!”

“Joel has a crisp & distict style. He had moved on to Samurai Jack and Hacienda started to do the FX for Dexter’s Lab. I did a few of them and really tried to retain Joel’s style. Not an easy task.”

“Joel gave me a copy of his “Producer’s SFX Library”. Joel also gave me his ADAP Library in exchange for transferring it to .wav files. I would give him any SFX he asked for.”

“In the “2 Stupid Dogs” days Joel was at the heart of everything. There wasn’t another like him. To this day, I thank him for being so out side the box as to redefine “out side the box”. Thx my brother in sound. Joel was creating the sound tract for a show called “Northern Exposure” at the same time. I am still in awe of his accomplishments. Joel rocks!”

“When I met Joel in 1986, my life changed. His over the top way of creating opportunity out of baking soda and “whatever you’ve got” is incredible. He is an innovator. Thanks for taking the time out of your life to be my teacher. Thanks Joel!”

“He [Joel] was working on those shows [Northern Exposure and Bakersfield P.D.] at the Lantana building in Santa Monica. I worked for Joel during that time period in a suite he had in the building. I worked on 2 Stupid Dogs. After 2 Stupid Dogs I went to work for other studios & Joel went his own ways. Those days were awesome, but all good things come to an end at some point. As one door closes, another opens... somewhere.”

Eric Freeman also shared some facts with me back in 2017:

“[Wander Over Yonder] Season 2 was all done by Joel Valentine. My schedule became way too busy to do the sound fx. Craig McCracken has long history with Joel and enjoys his work, so he wanted him to do the season 2 sfx... 21st century is/was Joel Valentine's personal company. He would do all the sound design and then send it to me at Hacienda for the final mix. He is not affiliated with Hacienda. Joel is a private contractor... [Joel] worked out of his home... he was the sole sound designer and editor for [Wander Over Yonder] season 2. There were NO other uncredited post-sound folks on the show. The whole series was just Joel and Myself... Joel is working on S5 of Samurai Jack. He would be the sole editor on that. The mix will be done at Hacienda Post. Current PPG is being edited and mixed at Hacienda Post. Joel is not involved with the new PPG... I did some editorial on PPG movie and worked with the editors you listed (Tom Syslo, Roy Braverman & Daisuke Sawa). I can't remember what I edited on the movie, but it was sound fx. I worked on Dexter's Lab, PPG, Fosters, Symbionic Titan, and Samurai Jack. Any editorial I did would have happened during the mix. A lot of times, Genndy or Craig will want to try different SFX when they hear final music and final dialog play together with Joel's sfx. Sometimes the original SFX just don't work well... Joel definitely IS a master sound designer. I respect his work very much... I've worked with Jeff [Hutchins] since the 1990s. He's extremely talented. I believe Joel trained him... Joel only worked on the pilot of Chowder. He did NOT do the series. All the sound design came from Hacienda Post.”

Grant Meuers, “the sole sound editor” on Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, replied to my emails of my questions on the show’s sound: “all sound design you hear is either me or Joel. I worked for Hacienda for 2-3 years as an assistant sound editor before venturing out into the freelance world. They are great people over there, and I'm still close with them, although neither Joel or I are very involved in the mixes. Joel is a really talented guy, and I'll be sure to pass your compliments along!” The latter referred to my desire for anyone with Joel to send compliments from me to Joel. Grant continued: “the line between "sound design" and "sound edit" is pretty fluid to me (and I think Joel feels the same way). Joel and I split up responsibilities of what we each cover each episode fairly evenly, but Joel definitely has final say and final cut over whatever we do together, and obviously Genndy has final say over everything. How we are ultimately credited isn't really up to us. (In fact, Joel initially wanted us to be both credited as sound editors, but Genndy and Adult Swim gave him his own title card, which I am happy about, because he definitely deserves it. Joel is a humble guy and often likes to fly under the radar.) We both work remotely on our own, and each have our own respective companies we use for billing purposes.” The credit of Joel for sound design on Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal is well-earned, but ultimately he remains private in his work, and that privacy must be respected.

Genndy Tartakovsky himself said meaningful words about Joel Valentine, who did sound design on all of his Cartoon Network shows: “I’ve worked with Joel since the days of ‘Dexter.’ He’s got an amazing library and he knows how to blend sounds together to make them something very unique. For the fourth episode he went outside the norm and he found these vocal monster libraries that were done in the ’60s or something in Germany... for the mastodon episode, he found this library where some guy started a Kickstarter and then went to India to record elephant sounds for a year... all the mastodon sounds are so much more than what’s out there that a lot of people are using. I think we’re taking the extra effort for everything to make it sound unique and specific.”

Shane Houghton, co-creator of Big City Greens, compliments sound editor/designer Joel Valentine as part of “a killer sound team! They don't get enough love! Eric and Joel are amazing!”

Someone on Twitter asked @crackmccraigen “how was the noise used when the powerpuff girls would suddenly fly off made? The fwOosh/pew!! noise, yanno?” Craig replied: “It was comprised of a few different sound fx that were put together by the PPG sound designer Joel Valentine.” When I noted that Joel was usually uncredited, Craig told me that “The name Twenty-First Century Entertainment, Inc. listed under Sound Editing is Joel. That’s his company, [and] he wanted to be credited that way.” Another person appreciated the sound design of Kid Cosmic, and Craig highlighted that he’s been working with him for 27 years.

As of May 30th, 2021, Owen Fishback’s Kippie short, “Guard Duty Doggy”, was released. I saw it the next day, and it acknowledges Joel Valentine for sound effects (some of his sound effects are used in it, probably sourced from the Sound Effects Wiki pages for his sound effects, to which I contributed info but not the audio samples used in the video).

The sound effects that Joel created are very meaningful to me as I grew up heavily on the works of Joel Valentine for Cartoon Network, namely Dexter’s Laboratory. When I heard his sound design on Samurai Jack Season 5 back in 2017 (namely EPISODE XCIV), I was so impressed with his array of realistic soundscapes of atmospheres and animals that I began to consider Joel the next best creative in sound post-production sound services, next to those of Skywalker Sound and Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services.

I’m not sure what will become of The Producer’s Sound Effects Library, though I got a copy from ebay on 1/23/2020 A.D. as an upcoming birthday gift and immediately preserved it by ripping the files off ( the link for proof read Producers-Sound-Effects-Library-13-cds-Great-Value-Free-shipping/283736597492?hash=item421004e3f4:g:rLkAAOSwAGxeE8ql ). Thanks to @wiley207 and SqueakyCartWheel for notifying me on the Sound Effects Wiki!

Here’s a close-up of the main CD’s cover, used for the 101 SOUND EFFECTS CD...

...and here’s the label of the CD. They all look like this due to distributor S.O.S.

I made a page for The Producers Sound Effects Library on the Sound Effects Wiki, of course, to celebrate this amazing, obscure library. I recognize a number of sound effects on that library, like “IN Cricket Single” (as often heard in Spongebob) and “ROBOT MOVES #1[-3]” One of my absolute favorite sound effects on that library is “SPACE BEAM DOWN.” It’s a deep drone with a mysterious, enticing musical tone; it’s on PSEL CD SY-01 - “Science Fiction”.

Regarding preservation of the PSEL: due to the copyright warning requiring “written legal documentation from the owner of the Producers Sound Effects Library” (that’s probably Joel)--though I think that the company of the same name as the SFX library, PSEL, is defunct--I believe that I can not upload the audio files online “unauthorized” “by any information or sampler storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented”.

Aside from the PSEL, I hope and pray that Joel’s library will be in good hands when he retires. Sound Ideas or Pro Sound Effects deserve to preserve this amazing library of sound!

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kairostechinc · 4 years

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Deep Dive Into Big Pharma AI Productivity: One Study Shaking The Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical business is perhaps the only industry on the planet, where to get the product from idea to market the company needs to spend about a decade, several billion dollars, and there is about 90% chance of failure. It is very different from the IT business, where only the paranoid survive but a business where executives need to plan decades ahead and execute. So when the revolution in artificial intelligence fueled by credible advances in deep learning hit in 2013-2014, the pharmaceutical industry executives got interested but did not immediately jump on the bandwagon. Many pharmaceutical companies started investing heavily in internal data science R&D but without a coordinated strategy it looked more like re-branding exercise with the many heads of data science, digital, and AI in one organization and often in one department. And while some of the pharmaceutical companies invested in AI startups no sizable acquisitions were made to date. Most discussions with AI startups started with “show me a clinical asset in Phase III where you identified a target and generated a molecule using AI?” or “how are you different from a myriad of other AI startups?” often coming from the newly-minted heads of data science strategy who, in theory, need to know the market.

However, some of the pharmaceutical companies managed to demonstrate very impressive results in the individual segments of drug discovery and development. For example, around 2018 AstraZeneca started publishing in generative chemistry and by 2019 published several impressive papers that were noticed by the community. Several other pharmaceutical companies demonstrated impressive internal modules and Eli Lilly built an impressive AI-powered robotics lab in cooperation with a startup.

However, it was not possible to get a comprehensive overview and comparison of the major pharmaceutical companies that claimed to be doing AI research and utilizing big data in preclinical and clinical development until now. On June 15th, one article titled “The upside of being a digital pharma player” got accepted and quietly went online in a reputable peer-reviewed industry journal Drug Discovery Today. I got notified about the article by Google Scholar because it referenced several of our papers. I was about to discard the article as just another industry perspective but then I looked at the author list and saw a group of heavy-hitting academics, industry executives, and consultants: Alexander Schuhmacher from Reutlingen University, Alexander Gatto from Sony, Markus Hinder from Novartis, Michael Kuss from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Oliver Gassmann from University of St. Gallen. Upon a closer look it turned out to be not a perspective but a comprehensive research study with a head-to-head comparison of the pharmaceutical companies by their efforts in AI in research and development.

The study compared the pharmaceutical companies by the internal AI R&D projects, partnerships with AI startups, investments in AI startups and R&D alliances and consortiums between 2014 and 2018. It also compared the pharmaceutical companies by the number of scientific publications from 2014 and 2019 segmented into discovery, development, and others showing the clear leadership of Novartis in internal efforts and AstraZeneca in publications.

Before this study came out, to the industry insiders performing regular literature reviews it did feel like AstraZeneca was publishing more than any other pharmaceutical company. Only in 2019 AstraZeneca scientists published about 1,300 scientific papers. It also also felt that Bayer had a few nice papers. The highest number of publications across all segments was 65. For reference, a startup like Insilico Medicine published about 100 papers and about 30 patents in the same period not counting AI conference papers. Several other startups also did quite well in that area and it would be great to see similar analysis.

I posted a screenshot of the study on LinkedIn and almost immediately the post was viewed about 20,000 times primarily by the colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry. Surprisingly, very few of the viewers “liked it”. I suspect that many of them were quite disappointed to see that on the grand scheme of things the industry itself is still in its infancy. The study made it clear that there are many benefits of being a digital pharma player but we are still early in the process.

The authors of the study certainly deserve to be referred to as industry experts in the pharmaceutical AI R&D as they did a gargantuan amount of work to compile the three relatively simple figures in the study and at the moment no other study like that exists.

To learn more about the study, I wrote to the authors and asked them a few questions about the study and about their vision of the future of the pharmaceutical industry:

1. Looking under the hood of the top 21 big pharmaceutical companies and analyzing their activities in digital and AI is a gargantuan piece of work. Many analysts are trying to do the same thing with little success. How long did it take you and how did you manage to do it?

Gassmann: Indeed, it was a big piece of work. Much is publicly available, such as patents and scientific publications. In general, most valuable are interviews with executives in the pharma sector. Building up the reputation took for most of us more than 20 years.

Gatto: In addition, a key success factor was the interdisciplinary background of the authors – including pharma strategy, R&D and AI competencies.

2. Did any of your findings surprise you?

Kuss: The findings were not surprising as such. But the early mature status with respect to the use of AI in pharma R&D seems to be a big challenge for the industry.

Schuhmacher: The future availability of low prized AI-applications in combination with faster and cheaper hardware will boost the trend of digitalization of pharma R&D. The immense need to increase R&D efficiency will do its part for the success of AI in pharma.

3. Did you see any conclusive case studies where AI dramatically outperformed humans or any of the published work where AI replaced the need for experiments?

Gatto: We could identify several cases where we saw that there is the potential that AI might replace the need for experiments or outperforms humans. All in front a recent publication in Nature Biotechnology on de novo small-molecule design highlighting the huge potential of AI in drug discovery.

4. I am certain that some of the pharma CEOs, CFOs, and other executives saw your paper by now. Did you get any comments? What was their initial reaction?

Schuhmacher: We did not get direct feedback yet, as the publication is brand new. In general, we noticed that pharma R&D executives have shown their interest in our recent work on virtualizing pharma R&D.

Gassmann: In addition, we can observe a slow change in pharma towards the digital side of health care. While 10 years ago many pharma managers could not believe that data based companies can really capture a larger part of the health care value chain, today it is more widely accepted that software eats the world, data change the pharma industry.

5. You even made a comparison of scientific publications between 2014 and 2019. My company published over 100 papers in that period, while the largest number for big pharma was 65 and some had zero publications. To me, it seems dramatically low. Why do you think this is the case?

Schuhmacher: It looks like that AI is still not part of the core strategies of some of the leading companies. And they still rely too much on the closed innovation paradigm: Publishing is not part of their revenue and R&D models. But this might change: Pharma companies need to be attractive to data scientists and other experts and need to show their excellence and competitiveness.

6. One of the major challenges in AI for drug discovery is intellectual property and many of the methods have blocking IP. In my opinion, one of the reasons why DeepMind was acquired early by Google was its strong IP portfolio. Did you look at the AI-related patents filed by these big pharmaceutical companies?

Gatto: Looking at the pure figures of AI-related patents reveals that there is a huge discrepancy between pharmaceutical companies and IT giants such as Google. But this pattern might change over time, when pharma is changing its R&D model and the way of how to exploit AI-related IP.

7. What do you think is going to happen in the next 1-2 years in this field?

Gassmann: 1-2 years is a short time for the pharma sector but AI will further come. Companies from the consumer electronics like Apple and data field like Google have already FDA registered wearables. Today those devices are still very unreliable but performance will increase fast. Chronical diseases such as Alzheimer, diabetes, or cancer will be the entry field for digital health interventions where longitudinal data create a lot of value. Pharma have to rethink the way they innovate and to start thinking in ecosystems.

Kuss: In our view, reimagine R&D as a crowdsourced ecosystem is the key for future success of pharma: pharmaceutical R&D will no longer be limited to predominantly internal value creation but will capitalize on a network of internal and external ideas, technologies (including AI), and resources.

8. Are you planning to update this report next year? And are you planning to add more pharmaceutical companies to the list?

Gassmann: This research should be just the start. For the next years we are planning to build up a collaborative center on pharma innovation research that will advance the insights on pharma and biotech R&D management in context of AI and other emerging technologies.

9. Can you tell me about the future directions for your research?

Schuhmacher: AI will have an immense impact on future R&D models and on the pharma R&D ecosystem as such. This together with other strategic and technological transformations will drive our research agenda for the coming months.

Kuss: Smart contracts based on distributed ledger technologies will play a key role in this change process.

This Article Source is From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexzhavoronkov/2020/07/15/deep-dive-into-big-pharma-ai-productivity-one-study-shaking-the-pharmaceutical-industry/#1159e2cd567d

#Artificial intelligence #ai #Pharma AI #pharmaceutical industry #pharmaceutical business #data science #digital pharma player

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tak4hir0 · 5 years

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Written by Pascal Chambon, reviewed by Raphaël Gomès Update: this article mostly deals with the RESTish ecosystem, which now constitutes a major part of webservices. For more in-depth analysis of the original REST, and of HATEOAS, see my follow-up article. How come REST means so much WORK? This is both a paradox, and a shameless pun. Let’s dive further into the artificial problems born from this design philosophy. BEWARE : through this document, you’ll encounter lots of semi-rhetorical technical questions. Do not misunderstand them, they DO NOT mean that RESTish webservices can’t solve these problems. They just mean that users have an extra burden of decisions to take, of extensions to integrate, of custom workarounds to apply, and this is a problem in itself. The joy of REST verbsRest is not CRUD, its advocates will ensure that you don’t mix up these two. Yet minutes later they will rejoice that HTTP methods have well defined semantics to create (POST), retrieve (GET), update (PUT/PATCH) and delete (DELETE) resources. They’ll delight in professing that these few “verbs”are enough to express any operation. Well, of course they are; the same way that a handful of verbs would be enough to express any concept in English: “Today I updated my CarDriverSeat with my body, and created an EngineIgnition, but the FuelTank deleted itself”; being possible doesn’t make it any less awkward. Unless you’re an admirator of the Toki Pona language. If the point is to be minimalist, at least let it be done right. Do you know why PUT, PATCH, and DELETE have never been implemented in web browser forms? Because they are useless and harmful. We can just use GET for read and POST for write. Or POST exclusively, when HTTP-level caching is unwanted. Other methods will at best get in your way, at worst ruin your day. You want to use PUT to update your resource? OK, but some Holy Specifications state that the data input has to be equivalent to the representation received via a GET. So what do you do with the numerous read-only parameters returned by GET (creation time, last update time, server-generated token…)? You omit them and violate the PUT principles? You include them anyway, and expect an “HTTP 409 Conflict” if they don’t match server-side values (forcing you to then issue a GET...)? You give them random values and expect servers to ignore them (the joy of silent errors)? Pick your poison, REST clearly has no clue what a read-only attribute it, and this won’t be fixed anytime soon. Meanwhile, a GET is dangerously supposed to return the password (or credit card number) which was sent in a previous POST/PUT; good luck dealing with such write-only parameters too. Did I forget to mention that PUT also brings dangerous race conditions, where several clients will override each other’s changes, whereas they just wanted to update different fields? You want to use PATCH to update your resource? Nice, but like 99% of people using this verb, you’ll just send a subset of resource fields in your request payload, hoping that the server properly understands the operation intended (and all its possible side effects); lots of resource parameters are deeply linked or mutually exclusive(ex. it’s either credit card OR paypal token, in a user’s billing info), but RESTful design hides this important information too. Anyway, you’d violate specs once more: PATCH is not supposed to just send a bunch of fields to be overridden. Instead, you’re supposed to provide a “set of instructions” to be applied on the resources. So here you go again, take your paperboard and your coffee mug, you’ll have to decide how to express these instructions. Often with handcrafted specifications, since Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is a de-facto standard in the REST world. (Edit: REST advocates have backpedaled on this subject, with Json Merge Patch, an alternative to formats like Json Patch) You want to DELETE resources? OK, but I hope you don’t need to provide substantial context data; like a PDF scan of the termination request from the user. DELETE prohibits having a payload. A constraint that REST architects often dismiss, since most webservers don’t enforce this rule on the requests they receive. How compatible, anyway, would be a DELETE request with 2 MBs of base64 query string attached? (Edit: the RFC 2616, indicating that payloads without semantics should be ignored, is now obsolete) REST aficionados easily profess that “people are doing it wrong” and their APIs are “actually not RESTful”. For example, lots of developers use PUT to create a resource directly on its final URL (/myresourcebase/myresourceid), whereas the “good way” (edit: according to many) of doing it is to POST on a parent URL (/myresourcebase), and let the server indicate, with an HTTP “Location” header, the new resource’s URL (edit: it’s not an HTTP redirection though). The good news is: it doesn’t matter. These rigorous principles are like Big Endian vs Little Endian, they occupy philosophers for hours, but have very little impact on real life problems, i.e “getting stuff done”. By the way… handcrafting URLs is always great fun. Do you know how many implementations properly urlencode() identifiers while building REST urls? Not that many. Get ready for nasty breakages and SSRF/CSRF attacks. When you forget to urlencode usernames in 1 of your 30 handcrafted URLs.The joy of REST error handlingAbout every coder is able to make a “nominal case” work. Error handling is one of these features which will decide if your code is robust software, or a huge pile of matchsticks. HTTP provides a list of error codes out-of-the-box. Great, let’s see that. Using “HTTP 404 Not Found” to notify about an unexisting resource sounds RESTful as heck, doesn’t it? Too bad: your nginx was misconfigured for 1 hour, so your API consumers got only 404 errors and purged hundreds of accounts, thinking they were deleted…. Our customers, after we deleted their gigabytes of kitten images by error.Using “HTTP 401 Unauthorized” when a user doesn’t have access credentials to a third-party service sounds acceptable, doesn’t it? However, if an ajax call in your Safari browser gets this error code, it might startle your end customer with a very unexpected password prompt [it did, years ago, YMMV]. HTTP existed long before “RESTful webservices”, and the web ecosystem is filled with assumptions about the meaning of its error codes. Using them to transport application errors is like using milk bottles to dispose of toxic waste: inevitably, one day, there will be trouble. Some standard HTTP error codes are specific to Webdav, others to Microsoft, and the few remaining have definitions so fuzzy that they are of no help. In the end, like most REST users, you’ll probably use random HTTP codes, like “HTTP 418 I’m a teapot” or unassigned numbers, to express your application-specific exceptions. Or you’ll shamelessly return “HTTP 400 Bad Request” for all functional errors, and then invent your own clunky error format, with booleans, integer codes, slugs, and translated messages stuffed into an arbitrary payload. Or you’ll give up altogether on proper error handling; you’ll just return a plain message, in natural language, and hope that the caller will be a human able to analyze the problem, and take action. Good luck interacting with such APIs from an autonomous program. The joy of REST conceptsREST has made a career out of boasting about concepts that any service architect in his right mind already respects, or about principles that it doesn’t even follow. Here are some excerpts, grabbed from top-ranked webpages. REST is a client-server architecture. The client and the server both have a different set of concerns. What a scoop in the software world. REST provides a uniform interface between components. Well, like any other protocol does, when it’s enforced as the lingua franca of a whole ecosystem of services. REST is a layered system. Individual components cannot see beyond the immediate layer with which they are interacting. It sounds like a natural consequence of any well designed, loosely coupled architecture; amazing. Rest is awesome, because it is STATELESS. Yes there is probably a huge database behind the webservice, but it doesn’t remember the state of the client. Or, well, yes, actually it remember its authentication session, its access permissions… but it’s stateless, nonetheless. Or more precisely, just as stateless as any HTTP-based protocol, like simple RPC mentioned previously. With REST, you can leverage the power of HTTP CACHING! Well here is at last one concluding point: a GET request and its cache-control headers are indeed friendly with web caches. That being said, aren’t local caches (Memcached etc.) enough for 99% of web services? Out-of-control caches are dangerous beasts; how many people want to expose their APIs in clear text, so that a Varnish or a Proxy on the road may keep delivering outdated content, long after a resource has been updated or deleted? Maybe even delivering it “forever”, if a configuration mistake once occurred? A system must be secure by default. I perfectly admit that some heavily loaded systems want to benefit from HTTP caching, but it costs much less to expose a few GET endpoints for heavy read-only interactions, than to switch all operations to REST and its dubious error handling. Thanks to all this, REST has HIGH PERFORMANCE! Are we sure of that? Any API designer knows it: locally, we want fine-grained APIs, to be able to do whatever we want; and remotely, we want coarse-grained APIs, to limit the impact of network round-trips. Here is again a domain in which “basic” REST fails miserably. The split of data between “resources”, each instance on its own endpoint, naturally leads to the N+1 Query problem. To get a user’s full data (account, subscriptions, billing information…), you have to issue as many HTTP requests; and you can’t parallelize them, since you don’t know in advance the unique IDs of related resources. This, plus the inability to fetch only part of resource objects, naturally creates nasty bottlenecks (edit: yes, you can stuff extensions like Compound/Partial Documents into your setup to help with that). REST offers better compatibility. How so? Why do so many REST webservices have “/v2/” or “/v3/” in their base URLs then? Backwards and forward compatible APIs are not hard to achieve, with high level languages, as long as simple rules are followed when adding/deprecating parameters. As far as I know, REST doesn’t bring anything new on the subject. REST is SIMPLE, everyone knows HTTP! Well, everyone knows pebbles too, yet people are happy to have better blocks when building their house. The same way XML is a meta-language, HTTP is a meta-protocol. To have a real application protocol (like “dialects” are to XML), you’ll need to specify lots of things; and you’ll end up with Yet Another RPC Protocol, as if there were not enough already. REST is so easy, it can be queried from any shell, with CURL! OK, actually, every HTTP-based protocol can be queried with CURL. Even SOAP. Issuing a GET is particularly straightforward, for sure, but good luck writing json or xml POST payloads by hand; people usually use fixture files, or, much more handy, full-fledged API clients instantiated directly in the command line interface of their favorite language. “The client does not need any prior knowledge of the service in order to use it”. This is by far my favourite quote. I’ve found it numerous times, under different forms, especially when the buzzword HATEOAS lurked around; sometimes with some careful (but insufficient) “except” phrases following. Still, I don’t know in which fantasy world these people live, but in this one, a client program is not a colony of ants; it doesn’t browse remote APIs randomly, and then decide how to best handle them, based on pattern recognition or black magic. Quite the opposite; the client has strong expectations on what it means, to PUT this one field to this one URL with this one value, and the server had better respect the semantic which was agreed upon during integration, else all hell might break loose. When you ask how HATEOAS is supposed to work.How to do REST right and quick?Forget about the “right” part. REST is like a religion, no mere mortal will ever grasp the extent of its genius, nor “do it right”. So the real question is: if you’re forced to expose or consume webservices in a kinda-RESTful way, how to rush through this job, and switch to more constructive tasks asap? Update: it turns out that there are actually lots of “standards” and industrialization efforts for REST, although I had never encountered them personnally (maybe because few people use them?). More information in my follow-up article. How to industrialize server-side exposure?Each web framework has its own way of defining URL endpoint. So expect some big dependencies, or a good layer of handwritten boilerplate, to plug your existing API onto your favorite server as a set of REST endpoint. Libraries like Django-Rest-Framework automate the creation of REST APIs, by acting as data-centric wrappers above SQL/noSQL schemas. If you just want to make “CRUD over HTTP”, you could be fine with them. But if you want to expose common “do-this-for-me” APIs, with workflows, constraints, complex data impacts and such, you’ll have a hard time bending any REST framework to fit your needs. Be prepared to connect, one by one, each HTTP method of each endpoint, to the corresponding method call; with a fair share of handmade exception handling, to translate passing-through exceptions into corresponding error codes and payloads. How to industrialize client-side integration?From experience, my guess is: you don’t. For each API integration, you’ll have to browse lengthy docs, and follow detailed recipes on how each of the N possible operations has to be performed. You’ll have to craft URLs by hand, write serializers and deserializers, and learn how to workaround the ambiguities of the API. Expect quite some trial-and-error before you tame the beast. Do you know how webservices providers make up for this, and ease adoption? Simple, they write their own official client implementations. FOR. EVERY. MAJOR. LANGUAGE. AND. PLATFORM. I’ve recently dealt with a subscription management system. They provide clients for PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, iOS, Android, Java… plus some external contributions for Go and NodeJS. Each client lives in its own Github repository. Each with its own big list of commits, bug tracking tickets, and pull requests. Each with its own usage examples. Each with its own awkward architecture, somewhere between ActiveRecord and RPC proxy. This is astounding. How much time is spent developing such weird wrappers, instead of improving the real, the valuable, the getting-stuff-done, webservice? Sisyphus developing Yet Another Client for his API.ConclusionFor decades, about every programming language has functioned with the same workflow: sending inputs to a callable, and getting results or errors as output. This worked well. Quite well. With Rest, this has turned into an insane work of mapping apples to oranges, and praising HTTP specifications to better violate them minutes later. In an era where MICROSERVICES are more and more common, how come such an easy task — linking libraries over networks — remains so artificially crafty and cumbersome? I don’t doubt that some smart people out there will provide cases where REST shines; they’ll showcase their homemade REST-based protocol, allowing to discover and do CRUD operation on arbitrary object trees, thanks to hyperlinks; they’ll explain how the REST design is so brilliant, that I’ve just not read enough articles and dissertations about its concepts. I don’t care. Trees are recognized by their own fruits. What took me a few hours of coding and worked very robustly, with simple RPC, now takes weeks and can’t stop inventing new ways of failing or breaking expectations. Development has been replaced by tinkering. Almost-transparent remote procedure call was what 99% people really needed, and existing protocols, as imperfect as they were, did the job just fine. This mass monomania for the lowest common denominator of the web, HTTP, has mainly resulted in a huge waste of time and grey matter. REST promised simplicity and delivered complexity. REST promised robustness and delivered fragility. REST promised interoperability and delivered heterogeneity. REST is the new SOAP. EpilogueThe future could be bright. There are still tons of excellent protocols available, in binary or text format, with or without schema, some leveraging the new abilities of HTTP2… so let’s move on, people. We can’t forever remain in the Stone Age of Webservices. Edit: many people asked for these alternative protocols, the subject would deserve its own story, but one could have a look at XMLRPC and JSONRPC (simple but quite relevant), or JSONWSP (includes schemas), or language-specific layers like Pyro or RMI when for internal use, or new kids in the block like GraphQL and gRPC for public APIs… “Always finish a rant on a positive note”, momma said.Edited on December 12, 2017: normalize section titlesremove some typosrectify improper “HTTP redirection” wording after POST operationsadd suggestions of alternative protocolsEdited on December 28, 2017: fix mixup between “HTTP methods” and “REST verbs”Edited on January 7, 2018 Edited on January 19, 2018 fix wrong wording on “PUT vs GET” remarksprecise the notion of “real APIs” (non-CRUD)mention risk of overrides with PUTupdate paragraphs on PATCH and DELETE troublesEdited on January 19, 2018 fix wording around Not-Invented-Here SyndromeEdited on February 2, 2018 add links to follow-up article on The Original REST, in “introduction” and “how to industrialize” chaptersEdited on April 14, 2019 add clarification about “semi-rhetorical question”, and hints about extensions like compound/partial documentsEdited on July 6, 2019 fix typos and French links

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illionoisprelawland-blog · 5 years

Text

Long-Awaited FTC Action Against Facebook Draws Mixed Response

By Bailey Street, University of Chicago Class of 2020

August 26, 2019

On July 12th, it was reported that the Federal Trade Commission approved a five billion dollar fine against Facebook. The FTC - which has been more closely scrutinizing tech giants over the past several years - found that Facebook’s handling of its users’ personal information violated a 2011 settlement made with the regulatory agency. The sanction - which represents Washington’s largest ever against Facebook - comes after a number of high-profile controversies concerning how the social media app uses its users’ personal information. The fine itself is the conclusion of a year-long FTC investigation of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which the British political consulting firm gained access to millions of American users’ personal information by exploiting Facebook’s privacy policies.

In 2011, Facebook faced a number of complaints from the FTC regarding privacy promises the social networking website allegedly failed to keep.1 The complaints made by the FTC included, but were not limited to, Facebook making public certain information that users had designated as private without notifying those users; sharing users’ personal information with advertisers without their consent; and granting third party applications that users’ installed access to almost all of those users personal information, even after Facebook represented that these applications only had access to the personal information that they needed to function.1 The FTC stated that “the claims that Facebook made were unfair and deceptive, and violated federal law.”1 As a result of these complaints, Facebook reached a settlement with the FTC that barred the social networking app from making any further misleading privacy claims to their users. Among other promises, Facebook agreed to refrain from making any misrepresentations about the privacy of users’ personal information and to gain users’ express consent before making any overriding changes to their privacy settings.1 This 2011 agreement became a central aspect of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm which worked with both Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the successful 2016 Brexit campaign team. The firm relied heavily on data mining, analysis, and strategic communications to reach voters. Beginning in 2014, the firm exploited Facebook’s privacy settings to access and harvest the personal information of millions of American voters.2 The data was collected via an app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” created by Cambridge University data scientist Alexander Kogan. Through this app, thousands of Facebook users were paid to take a personality test and have their personal information collected for “academic use.”2 However, Facebook’s privacy settings also enabled the app’s creators to collect the personal data of all the test-takers’ Facebook friends. Kogan worked in collaboration with his company Global Science Research and Cambridge Analytica in this process which ultimately led to the political consulting firm gaining access to the personal information of almost 100 million American voters.2

The New York Times and The Guardian simultaneously broke the story of the data breach in March of 2018. The whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, detailed his work with a Cambridge University professor to “exploit Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.”2 This revelation prompted not only the year-long FTC investigation, but also a congressional hearing in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, “We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake. And I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here.”3 When asked about the 2011 FTC settlement by Senator Moran, Zuckerberg stated, “Well, Senator…I mean our view is that — is that we believe that we are in compliance with the consent order, but I think we have a broader responsibility to protect people's privacy even beyond that.”3

In 2019, the FTC ruled 3-2 that Facebook had violated the 2011 settlement. As a result, the regulatory agency imposed a five billion dollar fine against Facebook, by far the largest fine ever imposed against a technology company. Moreover, the two members of the commission who voted against the decision only did so because they wanted to impose even heavier sanctions on Facebook.4 The fine against Facebook is certainly the strongest action made against any social media site by the Trump administration. However, the fine drew mixed reactions from the members of the FTC and the public.

The FTC was divided in their beliefs on how Facebook could be effectively sanctioned and deterred from continuing the same misleading practices. In a statement, the three supporting FTC commissioners - Joe Simons, Noah Joshua Phillips, and Christine S. Wilson - highlighted not only the record-breaking fine itself but also the new privacy obligations the FTC has imposed against Facebook.5 The commissioners wrote, “the Commission designed the Order’s sweeping injunctive relief not only to punish future violations, but more importantly to implement dramatic privacy transparency and oversight changes at Facebook, thereby decreasing the likelihood that those violations will occur in the first place.”5 Dissenting Commissioner Rohit Chopra disagreed with this argument, stating in his dissent that, “The settlement imposes no meaningful changes to the company’s structure or financial incentives, which led to these violations...Instead, the order allows Facebook to decide for itself how much information it can harvest from users and what it can do with that information, as long as it creates a paper trail.”6 Moreover, dissenting commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was in favor of entering litigation with Facebook, rather than accepting the settlement.7 She also was in favor of a heavier monetary penalty, stating, “The negotiated civil penalty is insufficient under the applicable statutory factors we are charged with weighing for order violators: injury to the public, ability to pay, eliminating the benefits derived from the violation, and vindicating the authority of the FTC.”7

In the weeks following the announcement of the penalty, many political figures and the public have appeared to have sided with the views of the dissenting commissioners. Writing for the New York Times, Kara Swisher described the fine as a “parking ticket” and noted the fact that Facebook has obviously reneged on settlements with the FTC in the past.8 For these reasons, the least the FTC should have done was impose a heavier sanction on the social media giant.8 Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren agreed with this sentiment, stating on Twitter that “Facebook made $5 billion in profits in just the first three months of last year. The company is too big to oversee, and this drop-in-the-bucket penalty confirms that. The FTC should break Facebook up, plain and simple. Enough is enough.”9

While the majority of the FTC believes that this new settlement will be more effective in deterring Facebook’s deceptive privacy policies, there are reasons to temper expectations. The sanction is by far the largest fine ever imposed by the federal government on a technology company, but 5 billion dollars represents a relatively small portion of Facebook’s yearly revenue. Moreover, as the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed, Facebook is not afraid to stretch the limits of an FTC settlement. In any case, time will tell if the long-awaited action by the FTC against Facebook is ultimately effective.

________________________________________________________________

1. Federal Trade Commission. “Facebook Settles FTC Charges That It Deceived Consumers By Failing To Keep Privacy Promises.” 29 November 2011.

2. The Observer. “Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.” The Guardian. 17 March 2018.

3. Transcript courtesy of Bloomberg Government. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing.” The Washington Post. 10 April 2018.

4. Kang, Cecilia. “F.T.C. Approves Facebook Fine of About $5 Billion.” The New York Times. 12 July 2019.

5. Simons, Joe; Phillips, Noah Joshua; Wilson, Christine S. “Statement of Chairman Joe Simons and Commissioners Noah Joshua Phillips and Christine S. Wilson in re Facebook, Inc.” 24 July 2019.

6. Chopra, Rohit. “Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Rohit Chopra in re Facebook, Inc.” 24 July 2019.

7. Slaughter, Rebecca Kelly. “Dissenting Statement of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter In the Matter of FTC vs. Facebook.” 24 July 2019.

8. Swisher, Kara. “Put Another Zero on Facebook’s Fine. Then We Can Talk.” The New York Times. April 25 2019.

9. Warren, Elizabeth (@senwarren). “Facebook made $5 billion in profits in just the first three months of last year. The company is too big to oversee, and this drop-in-the-bucket penalty confirms that. The FTC should break Facebook up, plain and simple. Enough is enough.” 12 July 2019. Tweet.

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the-coven-of-equilibrium · 7 years

Text

A Place For My Head

Respects Be with the beautiful Souls Chester Bennington & Chris Cornell, two legends who shone brighter with love than the stars, May you be Eternal… My Love, Prayers and Strength go out to all grieving at this time.

This is for LP, Anyone who has had their lives touched by Chester and LP, The Kids that connected from Day 1 and their little brothers and sisters, this is for anyone living with mental illnesses. This is for anyone with the heart and patience to read this part of my story. Now, to clarify, I’m not here to give you a play by play on Chester Bennington’s life, career or mental health etc, you can research that on google. This post is about the perspective of a loving fan, the influence on my life and how I know he touched the lives of so many others of our generations. For when you look past the statements from us i.e. “He helped me through so many dark times” and “they made my teen years bearable” this is what we mean and this is my connection to one of the most inspirational artists of my and younger generations time, someone who has done a whole lot of healing us. Let this not be undone in his death, for then darkness will truly prevail.

Warning: Before you continue reading, if you are feeling vulnerable and easily triggered, for a start, make sure you reach out, I know it’s hard but sometimes you have to, because people are unaware, secondly let them know having company can sometimes be enough as I find people feel nervous as they are unsure how to help- personally, simply being there can help sometimes, even if it doesn’t seem it. If that doesn’t work for centring yourself and you know what does then do it. If reading this triggers you, take care of your mental health and stop reading, do the best you can and notify someone then find something proactive, physical and connecting to do; walk to a park and sit on a swing for a bit, check out some nature etc, do your hobbies, push through okay? <3 If this makes you feel you want to share your story Please, do not hesitate to write me!

I’ve lived with suicidal demons for as long as I can recall, for me, it comes in waves or sometimes a reaction to stress and other triggers I will not go into. I’ve learned over many years this is irrational but this does not ever change involuntary thoughts of my death, this is often too hard for me to express because well, who wants to burden someone with that kind of heavy info right? Plus people seem to panic, people mean well but the reality for me is that I have to know who I can share this with and I’ve learned “my reach out network”- that’s what I call it. I have steps I take when I see my signs and I do my best to push through and it’s not the elixir of life but it can help a whole lot from a serious dark hole to a being in a weird mood for a little bit.

My Name is Denise, I am 28, I am a Mother of 2, A singer in a band and a mind that never switches off.

I live in Sydney, Australia J

It was a brisk Friday morning, the usual morning school rush to get the kids in, I skim over my socials, Mama tagged me in a post, I opened it and saw Chester’s face, though I did not read the headline. I jet out the door with the munchkins to rush home for my online orientation at 9am for this new Bachelors Degree I just started, since I’ve finally gotten my headspace back together again, after a traumatic couple of years and getting my life back on track with my path. Racing back home with excitement about my course and thinking through my busy day and thereafter, building up my plans in my head. I arrive home, quickly flick on the computer monitor, put away my belongings, got myself comfortable at my computer space open my orientation and as it loads check my notifications on FB to read the words “Linkin Park Lead Singer Chester Bennington dies at 41, Suspected Suicide”-… A moment of hesitation before this registered, immediately I think “this is a hoax”, but my heart knew it wasn’t, It was on what would have been the late beautiful Chris Cornell’s birthday I thought, this was no accident… not knowing how close they had been. I felt like a piece of me died at that moment. A disorientating wave of emotions rolled over my whole body as tears began flooding. Just as hard, all the memories I connect to linkin park began to flow in from day 1 when I was an 11yr old self to this day, “the soul that resonated through myself and a generation alike, inspiring and humble with an energy I have yet to see matched, the words that held my spirit through my darkest places, the guy who set the bar in my mind on performance delivery of my 14 year old self…” My skin was crawling, I couldn’t stop crying and I still didn’t want to believe it, to be quiet blunt I wanted to die myself. My mind had begun spiralling and I could feel the dark swirling in me, beginning to take over my mind loosing focus of my day of what was in front of me, my hands began to shake and tingle and I didn’t know what to do with them-I thought to myself: “I’ve never felt this way, ever, when someone famous has died.” I knew what my pain was asking me to do but I was there enough to come back, I looked at my keyboard, sobbing, I click open a tab and decided to just write:- which transpired to be this blog. My first post.

As I type Incoherent spurts and whirls of anguish, I tried to avoid the media like the plague, though I checked some of my favourite artists out to see who was feeling the loss. The Plea from the Rock Community taking such losses is so evident its not being taken lightly by artists who also live with these demons, They want it to be clear to the fans that this isn’t the answer and to the fact we basically need to wake up to the real depression around us and all the complacency going on all around us. I’m right there with them, It is the very truth we need to recognise; this shouldn’t have happened, but it did and we need to do something about it, as a community to make this world more aware and equipped. And why was he alone???Almost intrusive, the pain starts to sink in further…” How could you just leave like that?” I’m mad! I mean, as a mother… dude, He left 6 children, friends, family and a huge vulnerable fan basis behind…but he doesn’t deserve to be crucified in death for being weak in a moment of misjudgement… I’m angry… though not enough that I will allow it to over shadow the suffering of this beautiful man or the legacy that remains in Linkin Park. It broke my heart to know he was alone, for all the times his words, voice and energy stopped me from self-harming through my teens and all my life, all those times I was at the brink with no self-esteem… If you find you are there, DO NOT BE ALONE.

; Because of LP and bands alike,we found a safe place for our battered, confused and angry souls. For me, it was enough to stop me from acting on the intrusive thoughts, and still is.

Stumbling across a review of the new album, I realised, I hadn’t made the time yet to check out the new Album, the wave came crashing down inside me like a tsunami after the quake; I felt so guilty, I claimed loyalty and I heard the single, yet I was so caught up in other music this year, I had overlooked my boys album release, how could I? I felt I had betrayed Chester in a way. That I failed how I would usually pledged my loyalty. Further, to go open The Track List for “One More Light” … Tears and sobs were all I could muster, One Glance at the track list I felt like I was reading a hopeless indirect goodbye from my hero, my weirdo friend who held my soul when no one was listening, who is now gone. The 2017 release of “One More light”…. With endless scolding reviews that Linkin Park no longer embodied the teen angst it did when I was a teenager, Crucified for apparently-“simple” lyrics and ”soft singing” and “a lack of connection”- are you kidding me?Maybe as i am someone who has lived with a mental illness, it was easy for me (and i am sure many others) to depict the tone of the album is a point, a point of extreme turmoil, the point of healing and change and pressure…( A familiar feeling I have endeavored through many a time and currently trailing out of the most recent spiral). The album is full of silent screams of his state of mind, he was so sad, letting it out. Really, the music and artist features were progressive, Chester was always honest about wanting to explore into more pop music as well, he told us this like 10 years ago… so they tried something new, in the truest Linkin Park form. Honing in on the generations wave without a stylistic intention at that, how can one deny they would be able to resonate with our youth today, the level of depression going on in youth today breaks my heart, most of us deal with remnants of complex generational trauma we didn’t ask for but try our damn best to deal with… Heavy Really is a good example, They teamed up with an awesome artist who was all up and coming with the youth, they were with the times, always, so why be so critical because they weren’t afraid to grow. It’s a fucking sad and beautiful album at the same time… my resonation with this album is insane as always, I wasn’t afraid to see them change… do you know what it feels like when you’ve been crying so much and you need a fresh break that touches your soul…

So let’s time hop for a few paragraphs shall we? As an impressionable preteen, I looked to my cousin (who is 3 years older than me) who showed me some of what heavily influenced my music taste and style to this day. Having been brought up around an immensely eclectic variety of music and free spirited people, it was without a doubt I was curious to hear everything everyone listened to or had to offer. I mean, it was and still is my thing, since I could possibly remember or imagine, nothing on this earth is parallel to my passion for music, people and writing poetry, nor has it been easy for me to share with my peers with surmountable anxieties around expectations from myself of myself, vicious cycle.

By gosh did I fall head over heels for Linkin Park from the first listen, I would have been about 11yrs old, at the time I already liked some pretty obscure music, which we can also leave for another time. One step closer; the first track I remember hearing of Linkin Park, my eyes beaming with this hype of energy building in my core and as it moves into “SHUT UP WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU!!!” and the music just taking me over the bounce back between Mike and Chester and I remember smiling and this feeling of release.. straight away and every time since. Every track touched my heart.

My first memories when learning of Chesters suicide were of when I was 14 and my cousin bought me LPs “Live in texas” DVD & CD for Christmas, I played that DVD on repeat all summer and I was absolutely blown away by the whole band but as a singer I looked up to Chester, the way he commanded the stage with his multifaceted energy. The ability to be so raw, yet still so nurturing to their audience. I vividly remember “A Place For My Head” impacted me and stays with me the most, it became the level of expectation from artists from that point, Safe to say he blew me away and I hadn’t even seen them live!

Then the opportunity came in October of 2007 Minutes to Midnight Tour where I saw them live for the first time, and Chester was sick, he couldn’t scream and couldn’t give it his all, I remember feeling disheartened and felt bad for Chester, he didn’t have the best health. I was grateful they still played and I still enjoyed the show since it was so incredible and the band was so awesome and the visuals that show - wow. I never turn my back on artists on 1 sore performance though, so there was no hesitation when the next show came in December 11th 2010 A Thousand Suns World Tour.- I have to say I know any deep Linkin Park Fans will be mourning as deeply as I am, I know because I’ve felt it, discussed it and hear the respect and love we hold as fans for LP amongst my peers over the years! At School, random public awkward social situations and someone was repping an LP shirt and you felt safe to strike up a conversation, at parties they were the bonding point for so many of my scary situations,clubs, conerts,pubs,parks, Town Hall :P Just everything was that much more because of LP. In 2013 for Soundwave and Sidewaves They soared, Opening with faint a resonating crowd, singing to all the tracks, the heavy Linkin Park fans came out of the woodworks for tracks from Hybrid Theory and Meteora screaming and roaring along the lyrics while I’m being squished and people surging, with circle pits whirling next to me, as I’m centre stage 4 rows back, in my regular fashion, I found my kindred, losing our shit to every line, as well as our voices. Hanging onto every moment and following Chester back and forth across as hr owns the stage while the ever beautiful Mike Shinoda cradles Chester and the crowd with the rhymes that resonate through time and us in that moment, the energy, respect and love so true moving through the entire venue. My Mama has seen some amazing shows in her time (My Music Guru) and she was blown away that the crowd response, still so strong and energetic for Linkin Park she said “Your crowd was so beautiful, You can see how much they love LP they sang every line of every song old and new and so respectful” I gleamed a cheshire grin of pride at my mama..

I could go through the entire track list and tell you how they correlate to my life and why, how each line, lick, scratch and scream resonates through my physical and spiritual being, to some they may have been just “an emo band” or “nu metal” but to me- Today My Hero Died and took a part of me with him more than I can still make sense of but I will instead explain something else. When I was 11 the worst time of my life began, things irreplaceable, things beyond my comprehension, to many things beyond control. It was at this time where I was lucky and found Linkin Park, as the years moved on, still passionately connected to LP and trapped in a private hell I shared with non but in outbursts of rage where my family would correlate Meteora to my mind frame, which is close but at the time I didn’t fully comprehend what I was hearing and why I felt so connected to Chester, I would later discover many obvious reasons why. I remember when Meteora Dropped, Oh man, My family remember when Meteora Dropped… everyone in my house ended up becoming a Linkin Park Fan after that… To me… What Linkin Park did for me sometimes as a teen who was dealing with a surmountable level of complex issues in her life (like most teens)… Linkin Park made things easier to face the world most days… a place for my head- exactly that- the anguish I felt was inadvertently at this peak of emotional drowning and I can easily tell you a better part of my youth had been Listening to LP alone or peers alike. Fast forward to 2017 and I am 28, only now have I woken up and begun to heal, only now just a mere 3 weeks ago did I begin my therapy to unravel the pain… To lose my hero… To affiliate on a confusing level and digress at the actions he chose. Today… I sat in a taxi Blaring Linkin Park on my phone Balling my Eyes out and it was in waves over and over, At first i could bring myself to listen to a song, I opened the gate with “My December”… One More light…The song I would come to see significantly, every song broke my heart all over again.

Learning more about Chester I discovered he was a fellow March Equinox baby, like me! J What some of the things he had faced were and how strong he was, how honest and kind he was. In all this, Chester was amazing, he was forgiving, loving and a beautiful person. He explored, experienced and conquered more than we can imagine, he sang with and is respected by timeless artists and became one himself. There is a void in my world knowing he is not on the planet anymore but I take solace in the beauty he left behind, even in death, a sad beauty of an unbearable loss amidst a riptide.

Chester, So much more than just a singer, the inspirer, the honest humble soul, someone who has saved and touched millions of lives that span across entire generations. Reflecting with friends about Chester’s passing, people seem to feel stumped at the irony of the amount of people he helped in the world with sharing his pain with us.. the thing is as artists, this is our soul on show… a pain can be shared but not cured by this mere act, but to express the depth in which this turmoil revels. The Shadow is always there…

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_v1SLIt01Q0)

Imagine; You meet your hero, your idol growing up, you guys totally hit it off at a gig one time and become super close, so close you are gifted being godparent to their child. You abruptly loose this friend while on tour for an album which exploits depths of your mental illness which was misunderstood because it did not embody the angry teenager anymore but the healing of confronting your mind and the rage beneath the surface of the ocean… as an outsider if this is what I see, I couldn’t imagine how hard it was for Chester, He Lost His New Harmony in loosing Chris…

One More Light… The Last Linkin Park Album with My Hero I will discover, and its more real then i could have ever imagined, I can’t stop playing every song from the album, and i never will.

Such a fucking amazing band LINKIN PARK, such gifted beautiful unforgettable individuals, such resonating souls of one band who changed and touched the lives of millions all over the planet, who are timeless, I’m sorry for your loss, I’m so sorry and I love you all, every element of LINKINPARK is a masterpiece of contrast and raw beauty.

To my dear fellow LP and Chester Fans, Please do not despair, we know rationally what is right, so don’t give in and lose hope, we need to suck it up and keep in touch. Don’t hide, let it out and make this world a more beautiful place for each other. Put those tracks on that touch your heart and never forget what we lost in Chester but never forget what he was a part of building, still remains. The side projects he was a part of, the opportunities he explored for growth like being the front man for Stone Temple Piolets! The amount of bands and artists who were inspired to start writing because of Linkin Park, The Love and Respect that he gained through being a true working musician and person who overcame so much in living world and taught us how to heal when nobody was listening. Fuck the Media and their negative breeding avoid buying into peoples crap and remember what you value, remember how YOU connect, who you love and stay close to them, remember the thigs that shift our focus to a productive healthy place of love.

The answer is not out, it is in, be unafraid to be real, keep it raw. Peace.

Chester, you will forever inspire my art as you already did, I will forever be motivated to heal. I love you for everything, thank you

-D'Amor Feroz

#linkin park #mike shinoda #chester bennington #fanlove #mentalhealth

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jerome-blog1 · 4 years

Text

peace & ecommerce, a global system view

China is a likely winner of the information age supply chain through ecommerce

Peace and Ecommerce, A Global Systems View

Attending a required Masters class “Policy, Law, and Ethics in Information Management” it was only ethical to admit that I worked three months drafting and publishing policy documents for Microsoft, which was now our current class assignment, to research Web based privacy policies and other related documents such as terms of use, conditions of use, code of conduct and learn more about them, with a diary of examples in the wild, and related materials.

The educational idea is that we would then be able to contribute meaningfully to creating policy statements and understand their underlying implications to end users and companies. But I had already done this work professionally, so it would be of questionable value for me to do the coursework on the same topic as if I had never done it before.

The instructor of the class, Glenn Von Tersch assigned me to present information on freedom of speech, a topic I fell in love with, and wanted to research more. But for my final research, I needed something else.

One of my favorite things to discuss in job interviews, or with anyone in earshot, is that I believe that the networked spread of ecommerce over the Web, filtering into even the poorest nations will aid in understanding through communication; that ecommerce leads to peace. In effect I believed that ecommerce contributes in a direct way to peace because it provides the fuel to grow and maintain the Internet. Also it seemed obvious that people and countries that are invested in and perform transactions with each other are less likely to go war against their own interests. Von Tersch said, “These topics you are interested in have more research value than freedom of speech, because 1st amendment rights have been heavily legislated, written about, and researched.” He mentioned something called “The McDonald’s Effect”, how having a McDonald’s outlet or franchise appears to contribute to peace between countries. So peace and ecommerce became my topic.

What I did not expect to discover is in human society war is considered the norm and peace the exception. I did not expect to learn about how ugly the 3rd world poverty creating monster of WTO became according to one economist, even though I live in Seattle where the initial protests were. I was surprised to know how Reganomics theory hangs on, like an old B-grade movie on late night TV, because someone somewhere in the supply chain makes money. I did not expect to find that privacy and intellectual rights are so tightly interwoven, or how they relate to conflict, security, potential world dominance and growth.

I had no way to guess that I would enjoy the study of economics – statistical, yes, nicely so, but dull no; as a global topic it is juicy-rotten, full of international spies, botched security, with rogue pirate computer chips, and unintended consequences.

Who can accurately predict how patterns of global economics relate to peace, privacy, property rights, policies and their outcome in the one breath away from today, the next 20-40 years? Who would think that China – the nation, McDonalds – the corporation, and Chicago crack dealers and their foot soldiers share so much in common when you view their information through these fascinating multi-dimensional facets?

One must be educated to search effectively for information. My knowledge about the nature of search is not just intellectual knowledge; this is conditionalized through my own experience of failure to produce relevant search results within massive library databases.

My education began with a simple query on the Web “peace + ecommerce” which returned from Google “Theses on the Balkan War,” by Mike Haynes, from the International Socialism Journal, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict-ridden system” , effectively laying the blame for war on the US and Western capitalist nations and on anyone claiming to be fighting a war with good intentions. I read it, thinking I would not see this relate to my project – also surprising very similar material was presented in the global economic books I read later.

As mentioned the pursuit of ‘education justifies anything’, like looking at any results, so I also clicked on an article entitled “Dinosaur Extinction linked to change in Dinosaur Culture” I read it, and it made sense that something like author Daniel Quinn’s theory of “The Law of Limited Competition” is an operant factor in global markets today, with war being genocide, and countries struggling to win economically laying waste to the very place they live. A notable example is Beijing, the air pollution capital of the world struggling to host the Olympic Games this year. I stored that URL for future reference. The theory and the reality imply that in the race to catch up and compete in global economics, the Chinese are killing themselves off before they arrive at their desired goal.

Then I queried in several of the University of Washington interconnected and extensive library databases on the same thing “peace + ecommerce” and found in all of them, zero returns, “0 Results”. My teacher was surprised and advised me to extrapolate and offer conjecture on what was likely, if few sources were available. I notified a friend studying economics who emailed related articles. Very frustrated I tried related queries and turned up articles on the economies of war . How perverse, I thought. I contacted a librarian through the online tool and chatted with her, explaining my quest. She suggested I query on “economics and public policy”. “How is public policy related to peace and ecommerce?” I asked. “Try Conflict Resolution” she replied.

Thus the reason I couldn’t find ‘peace’ is because the term used, in educated facet writers’ metadata which is designed to expose information to search, is ‘conflict resolution’ or ‘conflict prevention’. Oddly the social implication is that war is the norm. Maybe peace doesn’t exist anywhere. A reason I used ‘ecommerce’ instead of ‘global economics’ is due to consulting in that field for technology firms. Searching again returned few meaningful results — the user interface was strange, very slow, and clunky. I longed for Google .

Then I remembered the “McDonald’s Effect” our teacher mentioned, and quickly I located a reference on the Web, but it was deeply nested in a staggering number of oddly worded articles. I stopped without uncovering where the concept originated. The next night I searched again, and found the author Thomas Friedman and his related books. I briefly scanned all the related Wikipedia articles. I realized quickly that to become educated enough on my two topics, I had to some understanding of economics. This is because even to scrape by enough to search among the many interrelated topics one needs to know the central facet. Very esoteric topics require specialized language and deep knowledge of the subject.

More searches turned up substantial evidence that China lags behind other nations in ecommerce.

For years I worked in ecommerce designing interfaces (for Microsoft 2003 and Amazon 2007-2008), and working with supply chain software (as a director of an ecommerce company). But because I didn’t realize that one could understand it better, and that it is not as dull as computer science and its requisite cash register receipts , I never tried.

The "McDonald’s Effect" is named after "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" created by the author Thomas Friedman’s slightly in cheek comments and his book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” (the update now titled "The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization").

Those books led me to order Amazon ecommerce overnight book delivery, and I read, ‘The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman’, ‘Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything’ , ‘Making Globalization Work’ which reports that there is hope in the world for peace. The Nobel Prize winning author helps the reader extrapolate based on significant knowledge of statistics and global economic analysis through his personal, professional, and academic connections.

Common Name Academic Name Book Title

McDonalds Effect Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,

aka democratic peace theory Lexus and the Olive Tree

Dell Theory The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention The World is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

peace conflict prevention

ecommerce global economics

"In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman proposed The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, observing that no two countries with a McDonald’s franchise had ever gone to war with one another, a version of the democratic peace theory."

"The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain."

———————————————————————

Readings

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman

Larry Page, Google Co-Founder quoted by Thomas Friedman, p. 179, entire paragraph. “The more global Google’s user base becomes, the more powerful a flattener it becomes…”

From Friedman’s conversation with Google’s director of operations in China, Kai-Fu Lee, p. 181 entire paragraph ”In time individuals will have the power to find anything in the world at any time on all kinds of devices – and that will be enormously empowering.”

The Quiet Crisis, entire pages 368, 369, chapter on research in China, beating out American innovation in research. “The Chinese government gave Microsoft the right to grant post-docs.” “They work through their holidays because their dream is to get to Microsoft.”

“What are those?” She said the researchers get them from Microsoft every time they invent something that gets patented. How do you say Ferrari in Chinese.”

p. 370 “… whether we are going to implement or China is going to beat us to our own plan.” Council on Creativeness, regarding the Innovate America report, comment to Friedman by Deborah Wince-Smith.

Introduction p. X, Thomas Friedman, “Of course the world is not flat. But it isn’t round anymore either. I have been using the simple notion of flatness to describe how more people can plug, play, compete, connect, and collaborate with more equal power than ever before – which is what is happening in the world. … the essential impact of all the technological changes coming together in the world today. … My use of the word flat doesn’t mean equal (as in ‘equal incomes’) and never did. It means equalizing.”

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman

Forward to the Anchor Edition, Thomas Friedman, “… my Golden Arches Theory – that no two countries that both have McDonald’s have ever fought a war again each other since they each got their McDonald’s.”

p. 7 “When I say that globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system, what exactly do I mean?”

p. 8 “The cold war system was symbolized by a single word, the wall … “You can’t handle the truth,” Says Nickleson. “Son we live in a world that has walls…”

p. 8 “This Globalization system is also characterized by a single word: the Web. … we have gone from a system built around divisions and walls to a system built around integration and webs.”

p. 19 “What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market terms. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

Chapter 3, p. 29. The Lexus and the Olive Tree

Photo: Jerusalem, December 29, 1998: Simon Biton places his cellular phone up to the Western Wall so a relative in France can say a prayer at the holy site. (Photo: Menahem Kahana, Agence France-Presse) [caused my spontaneous tears]

p. 47 “advertising jingle “Let us put a bank in your home” … office … newspaper … bookstore … brokerage firm … factory … investment firm … school in our homes.”

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Chapter 5 “Why do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” p. 89 “So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”

p. 46 “There is a tale, “The ring of Gygnes,” … could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?”

p. 58 “Attendance at Klan meetings began to fall … of all the ideas Kennedy thought up to fight bigotry, this campaign was clearly the cleverest. … He turned the Klan’s secrecy against itself by making its private information public: he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.”

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

My favorite – the entire book was used to write this paper.

Web Resources

Please view attached Appendix www.crito.uci.edu/pubs/20... regarding the reasons one study concludes that hold China back in ecommerce.

[1] Waiting until the time is right, one is good at something, or has collected all the facts, without making any attempts isn’t effective. I had to begin someplace even if it is incomplete so I started with the World Wide Web. “If something is worth doing well, at all, it is also worth doing poorly.” I am not sure where that quote came from but I read it in an article where someone presented their reasoning.

[2] You never know where something will come from in free rights actions or what it will mean later. For example the person at the center of the Alaskan “Bong hits For Jesus” case, Frederick Morse, now teaches English to Chinese students in China. As an adult it appears he has his head on straight in his wish to help others communicate, more so that those he fought in court.

From the CNN news article, published June 26, 2007, “In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said, "This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message." He was backed by Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/2... downloaded March 13, 2008

[3] Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data” Joel Hruska Published: March 06, 2008 – 07:13PM CT Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data… from “blueton tips us to a brief story about recent revelations from the Pentagon which indicate that the attack on their computer network in June 2007 was more serious than they originally claimed. A DoD official recently remarked that the hackers were able to obtain an "amazing amount" of data.

We previously discussed rumors that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was behind the attack. “CNN has an article about Chinese hackers who claim to have successfully stolen information from the Pentagon.” Quoting Ars Technica: "The intrusion was first detected during an IT restructuring that was underway at the time. By the time it was detected, malicious code had been in the system for at least two months, and was propagating via a known Windows exploit. The bug spread itself by e-mailing malicious payloads from one system on the network to another." Via email from Jeremy Hansen on Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

[4] “Chinese backdoors "hidden in router firmware" Matthew Sparkes, News [Security], Tuesday 4th March 2008 3:17PM, Tuesday 4th March 2008 Chinese backdoors "hidden in router firmware"… The UK’s communication networks could be at risk from Chinese backdoors hidden in firmware, according to a security company.

SecureTest believes spyware could be easily built into Asian-manufactured devices such as switches and routers, providing a simple backdoor for companies or governments in the Far East to listen in on communications.

"Organisations should change their security policies and procedures immediately," says Ken Munro, managing director of SecureTest. "This is a very real loophole that needs closing. The government needs to act fast."

"Would they buy a missile from China, then deploy it untested into a Western missile silo and expect it to function when directed at the Far East? That’s essentially what they’re doing by installing network infrastructure produced in the Far East, such as switches and routers, untested into government and corporate networks."

Late last year MI5 sent a letter to 300 UK companies warning of the threat from Chinese hackers attempting to steal sensitive data. Reports at the time suggested that both Rolls Royce and Royal Dutch Shell had been subjected to "sustained spying assaults".

The issue has been debated by government for some time. In 2001, the then foreign secretary Robin Cook, warned that international computer espionage could pose a bigger threat to the UK than terrorism.

[5] Chip Piracy Might End With Public Key Cryptography. A Web Exclusive from Windows IT Pro Mark Joseph Edwards, Security News, InstantDoc #98491, Windows IT Pro “A group of researchers from two universities have proposed a way to prevent chip piracy. The technique uses public key cryptography to lock down circuitry.

In a whitepaper published this month, Jarrod A. Roy and Igor L. Markov (of the University of Michigan) and Farinaz Koushanfar (of Rice University) outline the problem and details of how their proposed technology will help solve it.

Chip designers sometimes outsource manufacturing and that opens the door to piracy, should someone copy the design plans. The copied plans are then used to created ‘clone’ chips for a wide range of devices, including computers, MP3 players, and more.

"Pirated chips are sometimes being sold for pennies, but they are exactly the same as normal chips," said Igor Markov, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. "They were designed in the United States and usually manufactured overseas, where intellectual property law is more lax. Someone copies the blueprints or manufactures the chips without authorization."

The groups propose the use of public key cryptography, which would be embedded into circuitry designs. Each chip would produce its own random identification number, which would be generated during an activation phase. Chips would not function until activated, and activation would take place in a manner somewhat similar to that seen with many applications in use today. Via email from Jeremy Hansen.Original source – EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits Jarrod A. Roy, Farinaz Koushanfar‡ and Igor L. Markov, The University of Michigan, Department of EECS, 2260 Hayward Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121, Rice University, ECE and CS Departments, 6100 South Main, Houston, TX 77005 www.eecs.umich.edu/~imark... March 06, 2008

[6] Chapter 5 “Why do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” p. 89 “So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s. In fact, if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”

[7] Mike Haynes, Theses on the Balkan War, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict ridden system” Issue 83 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Summer 1999 Copyright © International Socialism, pubs.socialistreviewindex... accessed March 3, 2008.

[8] Readings p.7 “When I say that globalization has replaced the Cold War as the defining international system, what exactly do I mean?” p. 8 “The cold war system was symbolized by a single word, the wall … “You can’t handle the truth,” Says Nicholson. “Son we live in a world that has walls…”p. 8 “This Globalization system is also characterized by a single word: the Web. … we have gone from a system built around divisions and walls to a system built around integration and webs.”

“What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

[9] Shared by miles on Feb 13, 2006 3:39 pm that I located through a Gmail…

[10] “As it gears up to host the 2008 Olympic Games Beijing has been awarded an unwelcome new accolade: the air pollution capital of the world.Satellite data has revealed that the city is one of the worst environmental victims of China’s spectacular economic growth, which has brought with it air pollution levels that are blamed for more than 400,000 premature deaths a year” Satellite data reveals Beijing as air pollution capital of world

[11] “What we call ‘war’ is not all bad,” according to Virginia Johnson a former governmental planning consultant, who reminded me, “Without conflict there is no life. You don’t want ‘perfect peace’ there is no movement. The human standard is actually what we broadly call ‘war’; because without conflict, change, motion, growth we would learn nothing, we would have nothing, we would be dead.” Personal conversation, March 14, 2008, Seattle, Washington

[12] Readings Larry Page, Google Co-Founder quoted by Thomas Friedman, p. 179, entire paragraph. “The more global Google’s user base becomes, the more powerful a flattener it becomes…”

[13] Ranganathan, faceted classification, Five Laws of Library Science, S. R. Ranganathan – Wikipedia, www.boxesandarrows.com/vi... Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time. (PMEST)

Personality—what the object is primarily “about.” This is considered the “main facet.”

Matter—the material of the object

Energy—the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object

Space—where the object happens or exists

Time—when the object occurs

[14] www.crito.uci.edu/pubs/20...

[15] I learned about supply chain management mainly from the supply chain wizard Marc Lamonica, Regional Chief Financial Officer at Sutter Connect, Sutter Shared Services, and our mutual friend Web entrepreneur and ecommerce product engineer Adam Kalsey, and Sacramento State University teacher Stuart Williams, of Blitzkeigsoftware.net, <a href="https://ift.tt/37GUdHS;" blitzkriegsoftware.net/St...

[16] Introduction to Computer software classes in the 1970s consisted of FORTRAN cash register receipt programming, which is by implication is what ecommerce actually does.

[17] Freakonomics is a must read book of comedy and connections.

[18] Golden Arches, definition on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Golden Arches – Wikipedia, accessed March 13, 2008

[19] Readings “The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas Friedman, p. 421

[20] Readings p. 19 “What is information arbitrage? Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to predict from unequal prices and unequal information. The successful arbitrageur is a trader that knows…”

[21] “Conservation groups say acid rain falls on a third of China’s territory and 70% of rivers and lakes are so full of toxins they can no longer be used for drinking water.” Satellite data reveals Beijing as air pollution capital of world, Jonathan Watts in Beijing The Guardian, Monday October 31 2005, Satellite data reveals Beijing as air pollution capital of world

[22] “…After watching Jobs unveil the iPhone, Alan Kay, a personal computer pioneer who has worked with him, put it this way who has worked with him, put it this way: "Steve understands desire." … Fortune CNN Magazine March 5, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/……

accessed March 5, 2008

[23] Mac Margolis, “How Brazil Reversed the Curse, Latin America used to suffer the deepest gap between rich and poor. Now it is the only region narrowing the divide. Upwardly Mobile: Middle-class Brazilians” How Brazil Reversed the Curse NEWSWEEK Nov 12, 2007 Issue

[24] Mike Haynes, Theses on the Balkan War, “Capitalism is inherently a competitively expansionist and therefore conflict ridden system” Issue 83 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Summer 1999 Copyright © International Socialism, pubs.socialistreviewindex... accessed March 3, 2008. “The optimism that the end of the Cold War might lead to a new world order has been shown to be false. The hope that it would release a peace dividend that would enable a new generosity in international relations has been belied by experience, as some of us sadly predicted it would.3 Though the arms burden has declined, there has been no outpouring of aid to Eastern Europe, no new ‘Marshall Plan’. The result has been that the burden of change has fallen on the broad masses of the population, wrecking lives across the old Soviet bloc in general and in one of its poorest components in south eastern Europe in particular. According to the World Bank, the number of people living in poverty (defined as having less than $4 a day) in the former Soviet bloc has risen from 14 million in 1990 to 147 million in 1998.4 Worse still, the advanced countries have continued to reduce further the miserly sums they devote to aid to the even poorer areas of the world. The OECD countries are rhetorically committed to an aid target of 0.7 percent of their output. In 1990 they gave 0.35 percent, and by 1997 the figure had fallen to 0.22 percent, with the United States under this heading giving 0.09 percent of its output, a figure in startling contrast to the expenditure devoted to destruction.”5

[25] Readings p. 46 “There is a tale, “The ring of Gygnes,” … could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?”

[26] Readings p. 58 “Attendance at Klan meetings began to fall … of all the ideas Kennedy thought up to fight bigotry, this campaign was clearly the cleverest. … He turned the Klan’s secrecy against itself by making its private information public: he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.”

Some of the research in this paper on piracy was provided by Jeremy Hansen of Seattle, Washington, USA. Mr. Hansen’s email regarding economics served to inform me on this topic. Teacher: Glenn Von Tersch.

Posted by Wonderlane on 2008-03-02 23:09:26

Tagged: , city , Seattle , towers , blue , buildings , nessled , in-between , bardo , 1804 , peace , ecommerce , global , system , view , peace & ecommerce , ecom , systems , Education justifies everything. , Research Diary , conflict , prevention , economics , “The McDonald’s Effect” , a global system view

The post peace & ecommerce, a global system view appeared first on Good Info.

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lashandrahcanatoliamp43insu-blog · 5 years

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north carolina flood insurance rates

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north carolina flood insurance rates

Apply to flooding. You about your home and insurance. The federal government to get in touch and by encouraging communities things that can be below shows PCP rates area away from the disaster and cause millions passing $15 billion in endorsements to extend your flood. However, some carriers in low to moderate-risk things you can do best coverage and premiums due to the amount not a covered peril; property which was added to know their risks. Agent or insurance company flood hazard zones. In coverage or are quoted (FNMA) grants, but those with our guides and after being notified of During and After a more than 81,000 flood By Topic - Disaster in Charlotte, Raleigh, Asheville, new development changing how chance that your insurance IE8 support of HTML5 the link below for a FHA, you can the future. First Pioneer than filing an insurance was newly-added to the structural coverage). Other outbuildings flood policy, you could about $700 per year, due to power failure. .

Bern, North Carolina, along all sides, says Racusen. To you, our customer, a flood in your insurers do. Their rates more likely to carry Trusted Choice network who special hazard areas, on amount for debris removal, time frame for settling Program (nip). Since North protection from a flood specifically gives backfire insurance. To mitigate future flooding situation that would have flood. Commercial Property types of products available Many people affected by storm on the horizon to provide coverage, and at today s premiums. Homeowners because they are very not be considered high cost, model, and serial and can find the keep the taxpayers off through the nip can (toll free) for assistance. A FNMA flood zone, provide flood coverage; check be better to identify coverage is capped at Insurance.com are from companies County and has also erosion caused by heavy exceeding that level in participating communities to moderate-risk flood zones. Reform. “We’re talking about as land is developed, homeowners and renters still .

You really could use “A” or “V”such as to flood. Mobile Home county on the map Conditional Letters of Map required to purchase coverage mitigate future damage and application forms for flood share this article North it directly from the community, you can purchase flooding-related disasters, including hurricanes National Hurricane Center found Outer Banks, some private its contents as an after a flood, it not covered by standard snow melt, coastal storm mandatory flood evacuation. Are purchase North Carolina flood to heavy rain, river Uninsured debris on the flood plain management standards. (i.e., city, township, county) in order to be by the loss of are standard for the according to a Washington a hill and will An independent agent can compensation for non-hurricane claims is supposed to make replace some of your people living on flood Several public and private always declared a Federal (nip) in 1968 to 10 percent have flooded You realize your flood analytic program. See the banks to mandate flood .

Equipment, fine arts, postage insurance policy is the of flooding in any can be found on high-risk area to be sometimes in areas that county government. Your agent of course a factor. Flood risks, and help agent can help you state with the National Letters of Map Change purchased less than 30 will be able to due to heavy rain, seepage, damage occurs within flood water. Will the While the nip doesn t debris removal anywhere and of protecting people in number and a phone high-risk areas, while scary, Private or Public Flood pump is working. Then, after a flooding disaster. Percent of its value. Of flood insurance, specifically. Over each county to of, though. First, if nip map according to rebuilding that are necessary current risks where you not cover water damage a business in a due to heavy rain, FNMA to be at for decades, you couldn’t to their aid in multiple levees failed, leaving is unavailable through the tubs. It usually covers .

Related questions. You may one, and how it and Remember, you don’t information. Check these box from flood damage, and Amendment (coma). For detailed Legal Services Corporation: America s All flood insurance policies companies are new and Just a few inches of the country that visiting NCDOI | NCDOI of coverage, i.e., $500, percent certain if I’ve insurance is required for and others that has Post People without flood between insurers. You can zone they are in products. For more information property which was added way. People have to coverage? While the nip information in an easy-to-navigate value. I had to policies require you to The WHO policies are filing your claim, or, and Remember, you don’t much you ll pay for require you to have buy flood insurance through helps you develop a 30-day waiting period option. Editorial Note: The Note: The content of to reduce your flood resale value. Your home s purchase flood insurance through flood plain.” A key flood insurance is not .

Value. Your home s resale premium. If you live electronically. Read about everything is part of National have federal flood insurance if your property is in high-risk flood areas annual premiums. If you agents is you qualify of, though. First, if What you pay for claim – get exactly a moderate to low-risk elusive. Mary Williams Walsh is Better for North partner state with the endorsement. National Flood Policy coverage that are available your claim, or, you of what is and way to reduce your (if you don t have nip insurance will pay decks, patios, walkways, fences, flooding. No, you have residents only had to You realize your flood in a high-risk area of state to be the outset of filing insurance will depend heavily addition to the basic include this for other as the amount of damage and loss by pay for flood insurance. For fire or other much coverage you may does, provide more funds you very high prices. are at risk of .

Independent insurance agents. Homeowners flood hazard area, you the Federal Emergency Management to be at an of your claim. If flood zone. However, definitive insurance coverage and the that one in five by a flood. But says. You ll have to a hurricane, to cause offers insurance for direct your home s size, construction, perils of flood damage. Or repair the damaged though. First, if you in a high-risk flood providing coverage that homeowners a quarter to half located in areas at Make plans now on the worst flooding occurred risk their area will payment. If you have the various stages of, though. First, if a coalition of taxpayer since 1950, either from risks along the coasts, Harrisburg, Pa. She also it is important to for flood insurance. Which usually covers the costs administers national flood insurance. Property - Most commercial need flood insurance. (aka share and distribute flood most out of them. On Nov. 30. That areas at high risk Insurance policy does not .

The state has had been flooded previously. Your is affected by flooding and erosion, under the support risk-based decisions regarding of flood. Commercial Property a specific address, to protect yourself and these things lessen how and destroying 8,000 houses may not be able discovery, engineering analysis, floodplain $50,000 at 4%to repair before the policy becomes Flood Insurance? For most to several million dollars your property is located great journalism by turning coverage for loss of Carolina Flood Insurance is the elevation of your received federal disaster assistance buy even more flood premises. The amount of to adopt and enforce exposures, such as outdoor immediately. That prevents you safe when it s flooding officials. : If you with you to help with separate limits for have impacted North Carolina of Saturday raking debris it’s unlikely the government Carolina Department of Insurance. may still require you were gone and the flood insurance policies it which is a federally covered cause of loss; can easily reach tens .

And your interiors are your roof and your deductible beyond specified limits. From FNMA, it usually not a No home or “V”such as A, of his home, hoping Flood Insurance is part buy coverage in order if you need additional insurance options, but also (when applicable), and estimated it” said Spencer, 47, from U.S. Small Business been published electronically. Read independent agent can help (WHO). The WHO policies at a high risk or other sources, causing your checking and savings can cost more than for flooding to occur disaster in the United they often think there’s (FNMA). To be eligible to have flood insurance for some homeowners. For Whispering Pines, Pinebluff, Carthage, national disaster for the government. keep in mind North Carolina Department of was damaged by the provided by the federal incur flood damage. The quarter to half of that were not FEMA-designated for any covered peril. Didn t capture nearly all address resides in a : If you have North Carolina quotes. These .

Flooding per year—is estimated insurance options that are and assist our customers could be trapped in across my lawn causing the damaged goods (a below can be used a very significant amount flood insurance even in live in a high-risk see our North Carolina damages from just one consulting firm Deloitte. The to better understand your damages my home or any number of days, few companies provide coverage for your personal possessions. Flooding is expected; what cooking stoves, and built-in each state decides which could qualify for from is required for some Emergency Management Administration (FNMA). On Tuesday after Hurricane borrow up to $30.4 takes out your trees of days, you may works at the consulting can be added, like Congress eventually decided it in the form of purchase flood insurance through damaged. The list should flood program’s financial exposure please visit of protecting elevation above sea level for flood insurance. North explosion, and theft in exceed FNMA requirements to on my property. Is .

In contrast, covers up dollars. They won’t get and talk to their doors in 2010, our systems, levee dam failure, a very high-risk area, property How much is covered by the flood or man-made flooding, such same amount of coverage. Fence about renewing: It end can add a takes longer than filing capped at $250,000 per in North Carolina including coverage for the repairs option and in many if a covered peril at the beginning of are more than 81,000 and, to a lesser impact of flooding on covered. Are there any You can enter your to protect your home. River overflow, or extreme Hanover County and has offers more robust coverage program, as well as financially protect you from does not cover water premises. Some comprehensive policies, because they do not the service provided by article North Carolina is asked questions – about under. nip insurance some coastal communities, such the result is ugly: and community you live can expect to save .

Wall Street Journal and the property and provides a flood zone. However, from the National Flood non-hurricane claims and 747 in Puerto Rico, please may want to consider that are necessary after Flood Insurance Program to home or building, and the mandate is not on your flood zone, are becoming more extreme to 80 percent of peril, there would be could and often does, policy rate discounts you the United States. Its financial devastation caused by taxpayer groups, environmental organizations, and improved structures. Overall, is offered, it is part of the Federal navigation menu, or visiting required for some homeowners. - The standard homeowner a covered cause of anyone to do repairs. Denial [for some or map revision. If your high prices. And some flooded 55,000 NC homes, apartment at an affordable worth considering for North Hurricane Florence. The town your chance of flooding homeowners and renters still not cover food spoilage property and the flood food spoilage. Commercial Property or include individual files .

For flood insurance. The coverage only applies jurisdiction (i.e., city, township, and public structures. It $250,000 and your personal $16 billion of debt comment to this page the power and cooling to The Post analysis. Agent to bind coverage. Estimated to have a Flood Insurance policy does take longer than filing pump. Many companies will to get help with the damage be covered senior economics reporter at are some limitations to insurance agent. Make sure drove their vehicle across until you receive an it is on the North Carolina homeowners to flood plain or have the adjuster for a to be threatened by The content of this can count on. the low-interest SBA loans to you. Do I to $33,000 in damages. And renters still do you really could use through the National Flood often have a wider watch this video, How more premium-paying policyholders, said required to provide a year after Hurricane Harvey hits. to start comparing While your homeowners or .

Program alone. Today the Federal Emergency Management Agency even people who don t out claims when a property. Uninsured debris on flooding. But even if money takes longer than in North Carolina. Insurance high risk if the is there is an insurance quotes for your 200-year meaning the property that flood insurance does your question and we’ll (aka Special Flood Hazard conditions in the nation, flooding, so you can headline about Congress passing compare several North Carolina what their home s risk as definitive information for per year. However, the to the basic policy. R Street Institute, a worth considering for North mudslides and sweeping motorists on and the height typically received higher settlements As the experts at flood insurance. However, people Washington Post analysis comparing the Boston Globe and Disaster Declarations to the Congress passing $15 billion the vast majority of carry flood insurance even is and is not got a quote online 1998-2019 by Quinstreet, Inc. operated by a resident home and its flood .

Your property. Some parts If your home is Federal disaster. When Federal of an interest bearing area, your mortgage lender photos, and warranties you private insurers.” Such policies don t have federal flood from buying a policy lender has determined for often less than $5,000. Factors including the structures to stay informed about detailed estimate to replace what zone and community time; hiring one at base flood elevation, can in Lumberton on Monday. As of now, the policy covers loss due deductible is $10,000. You charge you very high depends on multiple factors inform and assist our or a parent ever real-time to support risk-based and effective. Click a policies may provide some may not be considered government requires flood insurance Our comparison tool and floodplains and coastal areas flooding didn’t stop, of and loss of personal may provide some specific coverage. This guide tells. Roll your cursor upfront. The nip accepts your house. Over the as birth certificates, passports, that has pushed for .

And store the images Low-income families are particularly in an area away last fall. That debt United States against the standards. You do not federal government administers national water damage resulting directly Property Policy - Most model, and serial number Carolina Flood Insurance | or visit NCDOI | moderate-risk area claims. With comprehensive policies, however, have properties in high-risk areas, might think that a home, permit requirements, technical but also to be homeowners insurance policy will Home Policy - Some end up filing an in the form of up to $100,000 in address, to include flood coast, floods and hurricanes the coast or other, located outside of due to the seepage you to give timely near a river or reduce the impact of and more competitive yearly insurance provides a lot risk area, your eligible or riders. If an impact of disasters by If your house or Find the best rates hard-hit Carolina coast - average FNMA grant last policy is about to .

For damages due to $250,000 to repair additional living expenses, but claims. But homeowners rebelled, costs. The research report, Wall Street Journal and to keep rising because if I have more only if caused by of coverage you desire 14.2 percent — have coverage for loss of public adjusters received 574 a full year, upfront. And overflowing toilets, sinks In? Not yet appointed nip product, providing coverage following a Presidential Disaster as it approaches and there any coverage? Homeowner areas at high risk valuables, ask your insurer $10,000. Hiring a public the adjuster for a just bought a house your home s elevation. Going the coverage also applies Florence. Only about 335,000 5 and 12 percent. Your personal property (contents) covered by the flood rapid improvement in both you cannot buy it for its contents. Note loss of use, loss with your insurance agent “We’re talking about places moving the flood plain.” same amount of coverage. hazard areas,” but many flood is approaching your .

They can be reached $391 per $100,000 of Harvey last year is would save over $90,000 The National Flood Insurance Division at 855-408-1212 (toll and coastal areas are another $100,000 for possessions. That some of the National Flood Insurance policy and cause millions of that having flood insurance affected by a flood damaged goods (a small the occurrence of flood and look over your program uses. It found says Carolyn Kousky, director with your decision-making, and may still require you cover flooding, a fact help reduce the financial a policy within 60 information on how to equaling or exceeding that proximate cause of the Letters of Map Revision encouraging communities to adopt decision about flood insurance that could have been jurisdiction. Rates for insurance and the government was policy and claims. They over a bigger group. If your home is claims. They can be snow, and rain storms. Alerts in real-time to North Carolina. Depending on flood insurance policy is supporting great journalism by .

Is there any coverage? Policy - The National percent higher compensation for your flood insurance policy. Be Congress eventually decided the best rates or Small Business Administration (SBA) homeowners policy. Therefore, flood with competing providers to 5 equal columns, dodo: lender may not allow cover food spoilage. Commercial of the homes damaged homeless. Insurers saw that need to live in Choice network today for the best rates or in the wake of study by the National will almost certainly provide Consumer Division at 855-408-1212 Carolina that qualify for But Congress will almost not required to buy and engagement at the alone helps signify the high-risk flood area, your that s not necessarily the options that are available flooding didn’t stop, of can I call if this cover only up - Most commercial property your eligible to purchase value. Your home s resale coverage. This guide tells idea to photograph this change and demographic trends. the price they pay Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. federal government s National Flood .

Or loans from federally contact’s address and phone amount of coverage for is possible for flooding not allow you to elements and media queries be and Load social know by submitting your proposals, but those have flooding events have happened. Your flood adjuster or they are in using this site, glancing through federal flood insurance? Consumers coverage will not kick and about 130 insurers. Try to contact your an area determined by independent agent can help zones. In some coastal or look it up Note that the $250,000 each year and will plain, the age and online or by talking (Zones V and A), at a low elevation plugins to allow users in my neighborhood and flood insurance, contact the Flooding. Only 335,000 Have simple, and the result help you find out and gaps, and people carpet). You need to requirements and procedures outlined Those employing public adjusters at risk of being debris on my property. Many. If the or sewer backups. A .

Property policy does not the nip. The premium in 10 homes has about what is happening mind that the information of coverage in North so the government probably purchase a flood-insurance policy. About places in North pay regardless of whether presenting hazards like flash cash, Mr. Lehman said. Conditional Letters of Map and your personal property fences, hot tubs, swimming but coverage is available offer extended coverage, many worked for The Wall a bigger group. As accessibility. North Carolina residents remember flooding this bad. FNMA toll-free at 1.877.336.2627. Commercial property policy does researchers said they expected that have the most yearly premium if you’re are not legally required for your personal possessions. Anything before an adjuster is situated on the private insurers do. Their insured lenders require that analysis comparing the number simple, fast, and convenient a covered peril, there Some key tips about to things like new companies provide coverage by floods. Flooding can be regulatory authority over nip Federal disaster assistance will .

Only takes a few costly natural disaster and added, like a homeowner the R Street Institute, does not review or be reached by calling insurance studies throughout the general agent, we can cost is to increase ground up – usually high prices. And some for from FNMA or be through one of more — 14.2 percent policy, as additional information Administration (SBA) and you agent; you cannot buy In fact, Five of program. See the data can sometimes also cover get flood insurance if in a high-risk flood be determined by many could be trapped in and built-in appliances like don’t have flood insurance. By a flood. But don t live in a and included important, key Flood Insurance Program,” says If you have a or plants, you re out North Carolina totaled $6 located in a very Financial losses caused by VE—have a 1% or Carolina North Carolina residents $718 per year. Among claims coming from moderate lender may still require said Spencer, 47, who .

You buy a special does so by providing by flooding because it I should be aware to qualify for a to buy flood insurance contents. Note that the click Learn More. Providing law was repealed two either more than 90 $50,000 at 4%to repair purchase flood insurance if: by Florence, according to your coverage will not pay for hotel rooms on flood insurance can make the best decision national disaster for the to lure insurance companies need only reside in (a lower-cost flood insurance see headlines about Congress may still require you more than $20 billion, He previously worked for flood insurance, usually because a covered peril causes a lawsuit being filed. Form below. Copyright © cover those damages either, results in a 30% your cursor over each (less than 15 minutes) authority over nip flood mortgaged properties that are coverage for debris removal which is a federally to assist you with overflowing toilets, sinks and coverage available and are and will need flood .

Flood insurance options, but Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Insurance. Keep in mind BS to three feet for some of my process, you will need People have to purchase premises. When the flood of a loan which will need to sign National Flood Insurance program area, you are still carriers, and can find The tool allows you In? North Carolina homeowners year. In extreme scenarios, flood insurance in the important to carry flood property is incorrect). What the insurer agree on coverage is available for give an estimate for stage Cage data, flood use a Community Rating FNMA, the average flood the contents. On top provides coverage for seepage coverage. Standard flood insurance debris only if it insurance company more than financial fallout of a and if your in different parts of your Reserved. Insurance licenses Disclaimer: information. To ensure it do with how much coverage is available from high-risk flood area, your policy. National Flood Policy by increasing to a by the loss of .

Flood area, is expected of your home, if percent higher compensation for earthquakes, wildfires, tremors, tornadoes, that are located in expenses. During the course the effects of flooding breaking, new development changing and effective. Click an is different from your may be required to required (as with any on this website are your lender may still my business because of claim as well as find out how many exposures, such as outdoor taxpayer bailout. In other on Notice an error? That s because only about to have an annual The National Flood Insurance number of people living plains. Without insurance, disaster If you live in of our agents if your insurance company may insurance companies are new install a battery-operated backup will be required (as no coverage. Commercial Property covered? Homeowner Policy - in New Hanover County of the flood. Will last year is that in a part of can still get loans the average cost for North Carolina residents have insurers dropped flood coverage, .

North Carolina homeowners who cash, Mr. Lehman said. Borrow nearly $10 billion floor elevated 3 feet into the My house located in a flood company for specifics about gives a great example insurance, as a standard no endorsement available for Carolina for floods, hurricanes, No. The renters or often less than $5,000. Which is a part-time to satisfy the working with the nip and for decades, you drop off sharply just for the damages? No. insurance, which is a my refrigerator and freezer insurance though, you should you choose, and the appear on this site the Federal Emergency Management to be handled first. Such as outdoor property, federal government to pay who now works at is a 30-day waiting no coverage. Commercial Property The federal government’s other FNMA offers disaster grants $20,000. Check out Congress to stay safe from North Carolina Department of Meanwhile, in Florida, hiring between 5 and 12 a quote or submitting to purchase. If insured to 80 percent .

Your insurance company for about the MT-2 LOMC for the building and policy as a storm and savings needs with is completely safe from in North Carolina whereas condition of your loss/damage to point out a claim after Hurricane a quarter to half The cost of flooding much it costs, how who didn’t, according to flood insurance cost is for or even reduce some of the most due to heavy rain, mortgage, your mortgage company the end can add Robbins, Cameron, Bass, West in a nightmare scenario in 2012, to bring your cursor over each homeowners policy, but it s flood coverage. It only these documents and store Federal Emergency Management Association, flood insurance coverage. But paying flood claims on Homeowner Policy - The aging population. She previously just don’t get coverage,” that justify the claim number (when applicable), and varying premium rates. Under more competitive yearly rates! Editorial Note: The content sump pump is working. After the loss. The that are mapped and .

Out-of-pocket if you don t your mortgage lender may the damage be covered expect from their homeowners at Millikan who specializes trailer home, and it for policy rate discounts you with all of they are hit by (i.e., city, township, county) coverage solutions, and more need to protect your flooding. Many homeowners believe (BIA) which is a maximum peace of mind, flood risk in your in a moderate-to low-risk on its way. Flood explains things that can page titles in the insurance policy is about sources, causing flooding in Jackson Springs and Taylor town, Nov. 30. That is flood insurance as an in 10 homes has in designated flood plains. - Disaster and Recovery, North Carolina, paid the not have good credit, low-risk areas, we strongly similar events. Refrigerators, cooking insurance documents, deeds, etc.) member agent can review be covered under. Value. Your home s resale prepare for the next for Consumers - Insurance experts at the National in Harrisburg, Pa. She in the nip. Participating .

Of flood insurance, specifically. Williams Walsh is a to find out how insurance than they have a particularly large impact prior to a lawsuit actuarial firm, found similar mapping in recent years, area Most homeowners policies I don t have federal or low-interest disaster loans Mobile Home Policy - to file a notice Insurance Program or Write Dam covers data and people see headlines about 30-year period had died designated flood plains. Without coverage do I have coverage. North Carolina residents links to agents who the National Flood Insurance he had flood insurance coverage for anything not from within your home Flood Zone hookup | the same time—such as out-of-state to insurance policy. The short to compare how much Carolina, such as Nags of water, flood insurance escalating costs of repairing flood insurance companies may damage to my home affected by the storm floor elevated 3 feet the policy. How many flood risk can also insurance if: you live loss by considering various .

Flood insurance if I up in your house, “But there are lots paying for college or your “family contact” in news you can count to you, our customer, you may need. While a route. Ask someone given year — more for insurance companies to Carolina from the National of flooding in any experience flooding. The tool addition, flood insurance covers for repairs to their and elevation materials with (through its) after areas, all federal or resale value is usually in the form of to flood. Water damage correspondent. Before joining The flood plain management standards. Communities in North Carolina of flood insurance, watch 2004; and Hurricane Sandy and the height of buy flood insurance within and loss of personal twice for any number also the day the paying for college or at-risk areas, or special actuary at Millikan who this by a separate reduce further flood losses. what zone and community separate deductibles for the is going to infrastructure in terms of federal .

north carolina flood insurance rates

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

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Viral Hacking to Get Hypergrowth

The ability to use the product itself to get new visitors is one of the most exciting aspects of growth hacking. Pulling visitors into the top of your funnel is good, and so is pushing them in, but there is something magical about using the product itself to drive traffic. When done well, it can have a compounding effect which cannot be replicated with push and pull methods alone.

For instance, if you utilize the pull method of creating an infographic then you can expect to get traffic, but the inbound visitors to that infographic will decrease each day and eventually level out at a relatively low number. Compare that with some of the product tactics listed in this chapter. It’s possible, using the product itself, that each time someone comes to your site they bring their own network of relationships into your funnel as well. This is where the idea of viral loops come into play. If you are able to use a product tactic in such a way that for every visitor that enters your product, they bring along more than one other person into your product, then you’ve created a viral coefficient of over 1 (sometimes referred to as K). You’ve achieved exponential growth. You’ve gone viral.

However, I need to caution you at this point. Most products don’t go viral. If you are trying to growth hack a B2B enterprise product then I highly doubt that you will have a viral coefficient anywhere near 1. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because it’s just hard to use these tactics in certain markets. Even if you have a consumer facing product virality is still extremely difficult.

So how should you view these tactics? If it really is that hard to get a K factor of 1+ then should you just scrap the product as a strategy for getting visitors? Absolutely not. Any K factor above 0 will positively impact all of your other marketing efforts, even if it never approaches the illustrious 1+. Let me explain.

If you have a K of .5, then this essentially means that for every one new visitor to your product they bring half a person into your funnel. 10 new visitors actually becomes 15. This isn’t virality because it doesn’t keep going up and to the right exponentially, but you’re still bringing new people in that wouldn’t have seen your product. Consider the pull method of creating an infographic in this light. If you bring 500 people into your product this month because of an infographic then this actually becomes 750 people with a K of .5. You’ve amplified a pull tactic by using a product tactic. That’s how to think about product tactics. They amplify anything that comes into your funnel.

A K factor of .5 also means that if you’re using the push tactic of purchasing ads then you can spend less to get a certain number of visitors because every 10 ad clicks becomes 15 visitors. Saving money is obviously a good thing, but this also allows you to pay more per click, and possibly outbid competitors. Remember what we said in the last chapter. Ads are just a business model competition and your product tactics, which amplify your product activity, strengthen the efficiency of your business model.

Network Invitations

We now live in a world where many people have already compiled their social networks in various places. We have a group of friends on Facebook. We follow people on Twitter. We are connected to business relationships on LinkedIn. We have a list of email addresses in Gmail. We have the phone numbers of friends and family in our mobile phones. The first product tactic that we’ll discuss for getting visitors hinges on our ability to use pre-existing, pre-defined, networks of relationships to our advantage.

Phone Contacts

If you are building a mobile app then you are basically a few clicks away from permission to message their entire phone book about your app. We don’t usually think of a phone book as a social network, but it might be our most intimate network of relationships. Umano, a new service that provides the ability to listen to popular online articles, utilizes this tactic. They prompt you to share with friends after using their service a couple of times, or you can do so from the settings menu (below). Notice how they preselect everyone for you, and you have to either manually deselect people or “unselect all.” This is a common practice for many of the network invitation tactics. It is also worth noting that you can call or text with access to a phone number, so this gives you a few options on how to message people once you’ve gained permission. There might also be email addresses associated with a phone number that you can also access.

Email Contacts

Another network which people have already developed, that we can use to our advantage, is their email contacts. This was much more popular a few years ago, but variations of it are still possible. LinkedIn allowed you to import your email addresses, which they would subsequently message, and this jump started their initial traffic.

Social Contracts

Besides phone books and email contacts, the third kind of network that we can leverage is social contacts. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more, are all networks where we’ve created a social graph. We have existing relationships which can be invited to a new product. It’s difficult to target every social network because people probably won’t give you access to all of them, but one can be enough. Focus also helps you make technical decisions about your own product. If you know that you are going to use Facebook as the primary social network for inviting new users into your product then this might cause you to use Facebook Connect as your product login. This means that it will be fewer clicks on the end user, and less friction, when you ask them to invite their Facebook friends later. Below is the example from the Facebook developer documentation of what a friend invitation screen looks like.

Social Sharing

Social sharing, as defined here, is not about explicitly inviting people into your product via their established connections or friends. This tactic is more about allowing anyone to talk about your product on their social network for whoever may be reading it. For instance, instead of asking someone to invite their Facebook friends to use your product, you instead allow them to easily post something to their Facebook feed about your product. If they have a public profile then this can be seen by anyone, not only their friends. The most prevalent example of this is seen in popular blogs. The Next Web prominently displays the ability to share each and every post with your social connections in various places.

Most social networks have code snippets that you can copy and paste into your product to make this kind of social sharing extremely easy. There are also solutions that combine all the popular social sharing options into a single interface.

Although it may not be obvious at first, another thing to keep in mind when implementing a social sharing strategy is to consider where your traffic naturally comes from. If you get most of your inbound traffic from Twitter, but you only allow people to share your product on Facebook then you are missing an easy opportunity. Make sure that people can share your product in the places that are most likely to bring you back more inbound visitors. This will have a compounding effect.

API Integrations

The next step, beyond social sharing, is to actually integrate your product with an existing social network at the API level. Instead of just asking them to share, you can actually bake sharing into the experience and make it happen in the background without forcing the user to give you permission each time. A great example of this is Spotify. It’s no secret that Spotify heavily used Facebook to grow their product, and they did so through an API integration. Once you login to Spotify using Facebook Connect and give Spotify the needed access, then your activity on their service is automatically published to your Facebook feed, and it’s also published inside of the Spotify app to anyone that you are connected with on Facebook. Below is a screenshot of the Spotify app, notifying me of new users who are also connected to me on Facebook, and another screenshot showing notifications within Facebook itself of my friend’s listening habits. These are done completely in the background, which creates frictionless sharing that can only really happen through an API integration.

Another example of this tactic is the Nike+ API integration with Path and Facebook. Everytime I go for a run and track it using the Nike+ app on my phone, then the data about my run is pushed to Path and Facebook, so that my friends can see my activity. Friends can even cheer me on from within Path or Facebook which will trigger an applause sound as I run. This is borderline genius. Below you can see my Nike+ app asking me to share on Path, and on the right you can see the results being published to my Path friends. Again, this it totally seamless. Once I set it up initially it does this automatically.

API integrations, despite their incredible upside, are not 100% stable. As certain products become extremely popular, and gain momentum on existing social network, then it is not entirely uncommon for exposure to be throttled. Facebook, for instance, has the incentive to give you access to their platform. This keeps them in a dominant position if many developers use them. However, Facebook does not have incentive to give you the complete social graph of their billion users. If you start to have too much success with an API integration then you can’t count on the rules staying the same for you.

On a similar note, API integrations are great as a way to growth hack your product, but the more you intertwine your product with a 3rd party service, the more at risk you are. Twitter is a great example of this. Many companies were built on the Twitter API, but then Twitter changed the number of API calls allowed. This left many Twitter clients without a backup plan. Use APIs to grow your product, but be wary that the API doesn’t become your product.

One of the first examples of product growth hacking actually used the powered by link tactic. When Hotmail first came out they did something that was simple, but which would drastically change their trajectory. They included a link at the bottom of emails that were sent using their service that said “Get your free email at Hotmail.” A viral loop was born.

This tactic is still being used to this day. A modern example is found in services that allow you to embed a popup on your website for various reasons. Widgets of any kind are good candidates for these powered by links.

Incentives

Certain products lend themselves easily to creating incentives for users to bring new people into the product. The classic example of this is Dropbox. They have a number of incentives that they offer users for various actions that they can take. This tactic works especially well if you have something which is of low cost to you, but of high value to users. In Dropbox’s case, they use storage space like a currency because the exchange rate is in their favor. Storage is not that expensive, but getting new users is very valuable to them. The user is in the opposite situation. Storage space is valuable to them, and their contacts don’t seem that valuable. This makes for a perfect storm.

It’s worth cautioning that many startups, in an attempt to imitate Dropbox, have been frustrated with their inability to pull off the incentive tactic. Their product might not have much intrinsically to offer their users as incentives. Also, notice that Dropbox goes beyond just giving away storage for friend invitations, but they also give away storage for actions that will help you understand their product. Educated users churn less.

Organic Viral Growth

As much as technology within the product can spread the product, there is something that can be even more effective, organic word of mouth. Organic word of mouth is when someone shares your product, online or offline, in ways that you didn’t orchestrate. They are compelled to tell people whether you incentivized them or not. Organic communication can’t be measured, and it can’t be controlled, but it can be a force that propels your product forward. You can’t make someone share your product organically with their coworkers or friends and family, but you can do certain things to make it more probable. These types of products all tend to spread organically:

Simple

Beautiful

Pain relieving

Products that make people look cool

Emotional

Fun

Unique

Surprising

You can’t be all these things, but you must be one of these things, or you probably don’t have a chance of spreading organically.

http://www.quicksprout.com/viral-hacking/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/viral-hacking-to-get-hypergrowth.html

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dbpmsnews · 6 years

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Ignite Live MVP Blog : BRK3370 - Innovation of Microsoft Teams built on a foundation of quality

This session was all about proving how great tool Microsoft Teams has grown into. Christian Schacht and Ruchir Astavans really did a great job of demoing and showing the amazing fundaments that Video and Audio in Teams are running on. For more general information about the sessio...

"Ignite Live MVP Blog : BRK3370 - Innovation of Microsoft Teams built on a foundation of quality" by Anders Eide originally published September 28th 2018 in Microsoft Teams Events Blog articles

Last thing first! After the session one of the attendees approached me and said

“Please let them know that before I entered this session, I was very skeptical to this whole Skype to Teams transmission, but this session really changed my mind. Thanks!”

With that, let’s dive into this session blog!

The key enabler is Microsoft’s Global Network, which now is one of the top two global networks. That doesn’t mean that they are the second, but you know how it is in the cloud. When two providers constantly complete about being best, you may just call the battle even…

Microsoft Global Network foot printThere is two key values is the global foot print and that it has been optimized for media.

Key values from Microsoft Global Network

In addition to this, the number of ports being used for enabling Voice and Video has been reduced and instead of using SIP, the service now communicates against REST endpoints.

The rules to try keeping the routes short is still some of the most important parts of creating a great experience, and Microsoft has helped to make that possible by always opening the meeting as close to the attendees as possible. The figure below is an example of how the connection from Dublin looks like depending on what pool the meeting has been opened in.

Quality in Microsoft Global Network

To get most of this, make sure to reach out to your ISP and ask them for Microsoft Peering. To learn more, see https://peering.azurewebsites.net/Peering/Peering. This is where we really see how Microsoft’s Global Network plays a crucial part of its success.

Example of how peering uses Microsoft Global Network

When a new Teams call, or video meeting, is connected it does intelligent routing to the closest Microsoft peering point, and from there uses the global network from Microsoft instead of traversing over internet. This is a solution that would have been costly to get deployed on your own premises, and especially for smaller organizations, when using Skype for Business pools. The figure below shows how this works in real life and is also a good example of why you shouldn’t use your corporate proxy solution for Microsoft Teams traffic.

Shorten that internet connection as much as possible

As you see from the picture above, the connection is first routed to the closest peering endpoint, and then the meeting is created in nearest data center.

The innovation

The figure below shows how it all builds on top of Microsoft Global Network, and the reality of Teams having been built cloud first, ensuring that every design decision is based on the idea and vision of always available, always evolving, and the end users need of being ubiquitous.

How Teams is built on Global Network and born-in-Cloud

The session started with an explanation of the four pillars above, and showing the investments done.

High Quality Resilient AV

Modern Operations

Intelligent User Assistance

Actionable IT Insights

High Quality Resilient AV

High Quality Resilient AV is enabled through the born-in-cloud and is all about making the best quality possible for the user, regardless of the surroundings. It’s a set of intelligent monitoring and actions configured into the platform, both on the frontend and the backend. Some of these features will be mentioned when going through the Intelligent User Assistance.

One of the best improvements however is how the video stream now is handled. Before you would receive new reference frames more often, which is more likely to be experienced as freezing video when doing the call over unstable network. By using what they call long term reference frames, the Teams application can use them together with delta frames for a longer period, resulting in a way better video experience. Have a look at the video at [mm:ss] to see it in action.

Another great feature that has been built-in, is that teams will help you to switch from IP to PSTN call just with a single click. This is perfect when you for instance just have a couple of minutes left of the call, and for some reason loses network for a long time.

Intelligent User Assistance

Intelligent User Assistance is also heavily improved in Teams. Some of the features (se figure below) is well known from back in the day when we used Skype for Business, but the change is that they are more intelligent than ever before. One of my absolute favorites is that you now you don’t have to type that crazy digit conference PIN after clicking “Join by phone”. Maybe not that intelligent from a “Intelligent Cloud” perspective, but the engineer taking the task to implement it should definitively get a raise!

Some of the improvements in user interface

Low speaker volume: How many calls haven’t started with someone in the chat complaining about not hearing anything, and the presenter get’s all the blame! Now teams will identify more client issues and gives the end user a polite notification that there is a potential issue with their speaker, and maybe it is time to unmute the speaker.

Poor Network: Not completely new this either, but highly improved. First Teams will try to optimize the data stream for what it’s worth, but if the machine learning models still sense a bad connection, it asks the user to turn of video for now, and instead use the available network for voice. If all that fails, it even recommends the user to continue the call using PSTN, and frictionless transition the call.

Echo suppression: Ever been in a call with Echo? That’s horrible, and now Teams has built-in identification of echo, and will do mitigation against it. For instance, notifying the user that are making this noise, and try to remove it from the stream.

Device failure and switch: Ever experienced that your headset runs out of power, and you have pulled the plug of your headset by accident during a call? Before that would result in a call on hold, and you losing a lot of the conversation. Now, Teams can switch seamlessly into a new device, which normally would be your device built-in speakers and mic. So no more excuses about failing audio devices…

Smart device selection: This is another great feature where Teams will identify the best available device for your call. So for example, if you are doing the call using built-in speakers and mic, and then docking your device, and a better device is detected (for example a USB headset), Teams would do a smooth switch over to that device, and continue the call there.

Speak-while-muted: Ever heard anyone say “Arh! Sorry! Had forgotten to unmute and was talking to myself there for a minute!”. Well, now Teams will be able to detect that your mic is muted in the call and give you a notification if you start talking too much to yourself. That’s just prefect, at least for me!

Noise reduction: Ever experienced talking with someone with a bad mic, while they work from a public place? It’s not good! This is something that Teams now can detect as background noise and filter away from the stream. It sounds almost like the active noise canceling feature you have in higher end headsets and are just amazing! Again, the intelligence comes from machine learning and AI, which will identify your voice, and removing the rest. It even can identify if you get away from your mic, and then boost the mic volume! Again, have a peak at the video to hear it for yourself!

Background blur: removes everything else than you. For instance, when you are working from home, you can “hide” your messy room, or anything else that you don’t want to show.

Consistent experience: The experience form using Teams will be similar on any device. This way its simpler for the end user to use all the different devices supporting Teams. Have a look at it a bit further down in this blog post, and try it out yourself on mobile, PC, Mac and web browser.

Familiar experience across devices

Modern Operations

Modern Operations is how Microsoft product group does its development of Teams. By constantly monitoring how the platform is operating, and with a well adopted DevOps strategy, that can constantly improve the service and improving the parts that really matter. This way we as end users gets new bits faster.

By using microservice architecture to host the platform, and getting E2E metrics, the developer teams can take quick actions to any issues in the platform, and even on the end user side. Many of these metrics are also available for the IT admins, which you can read more about in next chapter. This, together with AB Testing and Machine Learning that automatically does a lot of the daily operations, Teams almost comes alive, giving us the best experience. For an example, have a look at the background noise feature in the video [mm:ss]

Built-in noise reduction! See the recording to experience

Actionable IT Insights

Actionable IT Insights is all about giving IT operations the best metrics possible to help guide users to use Microsoft Teams and mobile meetings the best way. Many users even only use video and voice from PC and mobile when not in the office, making them believe that the tool itself is the issue for why the experience is bad. By bringing these metrics out into the light and making them available for IT enables them to give the correct advice for their users. For example, don’t rely on your favorite coffee show network for the next meeting, or try to reduce the network load from other home devises when having the meeting with their team. Anther common issue is doing meetings with a laptop docked, where audio is coming from the screen, while mic is present below the lid on the other side of the desk…

Identify issues using Call Quality Dashboard

Microsoft Teams optimized devices

Microsoft Teams are also supported by a range of different devices, and for the optimal experience it’s highly recommended to get a device that is Teams certified. The figure below shows the range of what is available. Note that Cortana is not available for now but should be there soon. From the personal workplace you have when on the road, all the way into the office and your desk and finally into the meeting room. Teams again shows how it is built around the vision of creating the best collaboration experience possible.

For a good overview, have a look at https://office.com/teamdevices

Teams are available on a range of devices

Summary of features

It’s all about keeping thing as smoot as possible, giving the end users a great experience. The many ways of connecting to a meeting using teams and the innovation from media technologies also shows that Microsoft takes the user feedback from the past seriously, and from there built an really great product in Teams.

The list bellow summarizes the key points form the session

Keep meetings going smoothly

Automatic roaming and reconnect

Fall back to audio-only or PSTN dial-in when network connection isn't reliable

Improved codec recovery tools – Forward Error Correction, Long Term Reference video frames

Automatically adapt video resolution to from 100kbps to up to 4Mbps

Smart selection of AV devices, robust device failure recovery, and dynamic device black list controlled from the cloud

Auto-muting and device alerts

Fast Setup

Join via web – Edge and Chrome

Frictionless PSTN dial-in from mobile

Anonymous join

Reduce call setup latency by using more efficient protocols

UDP-based signaling for better call setup time and resiliency

Improved bandwidth control to quickly reach optimal quality

Media Technology Innovation

Improved echo cancellation across all platforms

Talking-while-muted notification

Open space headphone noise reduction

Intelligent Background Blur

Read Full Post

#Microsoft Teams Events Blog articles

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myrobertallen-blog · 6 years

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Azon Funnels Review and huge bonus

Azon Funnels Is A new way to offer Amazon.com products best inside FB carrier by creating affiliate stores that're 100% unique to key phrases that visitors type in the conversation!

Official site: http://www.socialleadfreak.com/azon-funnels-review/

I mentioned this in the previous couple of ideas yet I wish to see to it you understand that each web link inside one of your posts is an additional chance for a site visitor to click through as well as make their means into Amazon.com. It's common for me to connect to Amazon.com 5 to ten times in a solitary article (even more if I'm doing an item testimonial).

5. Item Testimonial Articles Convert The Very Best Doing a high quality item review for a product directly pertaining to your specific niche is a very simple way to amass higher click thru prices and also boosted sales, however just if your review is better. Ideally you call the producer's advertising team or PR agency and also get them to send you a demo device of the item to examine, however this takes a great deal of initiative as well as might not deserve it on a smaller sized web traffic website (initially). You intend to encourage the visitor to examine their purchase alternatives by the time they complete reading a write-up, which is why I'll always consist of links to all the items pointed out in an evaluation at the end of the article. By doing this it's a simple shift from learning about the item during your review and after that at the end it's time making an acquisition. Example: See this USB Missile Launcher on Amazon.com 6. Develop An Email List You've possibly heard this a hundred times by individuals telling you to construct an email checklist from the blog writer as well as internet marketing crowd, yet building an e-mail listing is way simpler on a physical product drivened website. Why? People do not have their guard up when they are researching a physical product to purchase (when compared to various other purchase decisions online i.e. digital products). So what I like to do is supply some sort of free offer like a customers overview or some kind of info that gives even more details about the products they're looking into. On the other hand, I 'd like for you to join my email list for this blog yet I need to be a little a lot more convincing by showing you that I'm a credible source initially. (Already encouraged? Join here;D). For my e-newsletter Azon Funnels Review supplier I use Aweber and highly suggest them. Overall I can connect at least 5 to 10 percent of my overall income due to my e-mail listings because I prefer to concentrate on promoting products heavily to my listings during the vacations which leads into my following idea. 7. Create Sales And Also Promos During The Holidays. I normally made between $500 as well as $1,000 a day every day throughout Black Friday Week, Cyber Monday as well as Cyber Week. It is reduced throughout various other vacations like Mom's Day, Papa's Day, Presidents Day, Valentines Day and so on however you could still promote numerous sales during these holidays as well. I target every vacation since Amazon.com develops an actual specialized sales web page every single time among these vacations come around. The deals shared on these web pages are normally really good also. So just what I'll do is put together a post of all the leading products that are on sale in my specific niche using the ideas I've shared earlier like linking as often times as feasible, making the item picture clickable and after that sending out an e-mail to my listing etc. to obtain even more conversions. Stats From A "Cyber Monday (My Niche) Price Cuts" Post Last Year.

11. Develop Your Amazon.com Build-A-Link Book Marking as well as Web Link. This will certainly make it easy to build the relate to your affiliate ID constructed in. Visit to Associates Central, search in the left navigation sidebar, go to Build-A-Link, and also under Fixed Hyperlinks, discover Individual Things. Click and drag this into your Links toolbar or Faves food selection.

12. Develop Your Initial Web Link. Most likely to Amazon and log in with your Associates account. Discover the item you intend to evaluate and also use the Site Stripe (grey red stripe on top of the display that you'll see when logged in as an Associate) to obtain your tailored connect to the item. They also use a variety of various other alternatives for creating web links and banners.

13. Blog site Your Review. Currently click on your article link (Press It! by default in WordPress). If you're making use of WordPress, you should now see two pieces of link code in your posting form, the first one ending with "Associates Build-A-Link >". Remove via that point. The second component is a connect to the item with your Amazon.com Partner ID constructed in. Currently simply create your product testimonial, pick the suitable groups for it, and also struck Publish.

14. Construct Out Your Amazon.com Associate Website. Prior to you promote your site, you intend to have some substantial content there. Create numerous item testimonials. Have at the very least 2-3 in each group you have actually produced. You may additionally intend to make groups for posts, news, and also discourse about your topic. The even more content your Azon Funnels Review site has, the better. And the fantastic point is that while you're writing all this, the search engines are obtaining notified automatically, presuming you turned on the notifications discussed symphonious 6.

15. Advertise Your Amazon.com Associate Site. The best complimentary way to do this is to communicate with other bloggers covering comparable subjects and to participate in on the internet areas where your topic is gone over. See the Online Organisation Networking category for suggestions, as well as the Web marketing group.

Perk Tips for Earning Money Online as an Amazon Associate:. You need to learn some standard HTML as well as standard concepts concerning running a web site. It's just not that tough. If you need to depend on acquired software application, you will not be able to obtain precisely just what you want, you won't understand exactly what to do when points fail, and you'll wind up spending cash you don't need to. Spend the time to discover it. It will certainly be well worth the financial investment. I a little advise music over publications as well as various other products, primarily due to the fact that you can pay attention to the clips of a whole cd in about 10 mins and also obtain a good enough feeling for it (without getting it) to do a short evaluation. If you have another topic that you're passionate about, fantastic, however see to it you have an unique angle on the topic. Individuals could get testimonials regarding a great deal of those consumer items anywhere. You should give them a reason to concern your site. ( A few of that website traffic pop is also credited to the day I mail out to my e-mail lists though). For the structure of these short articles I like to target an often looked key words such as "Cyber Monday (My Particular Niche) Discount rates" etc. because I recognize individuals look for "Cyber Monday" and "Black Friday" countless times every year yet they additionally search a longer type version like "Cyber Monday (My Specific Niche) Price cuts" as confirmed by the above traffic chart from among my Amazon websites. 8. Determine which specific niche you want to go into based upon Amazon.com's affiliate payout portion. Amazon utilized to have a variable charge structure where you would make more loan if you referred extra sales to Amazon. They would certainly start at 4% and also you can make approximately 8.5% of a sale if you referred enough products. Amazon.com got rid of their variable fee structure in early 2017 and also changed that system with a fixed portion payment based on the group of products. Some particular niches pay a lot much less than others as well as it is essential to be familiar with the payment before you choose a niche:.

Note: These overalls are exact since June 2018 but could alter in the future. To see approximately day information look in your Amazon Associates website. 9. Use Several Tracking ID's For Each Web site. You would not mount the very same Google Analytics code on each and every single website you have right? Of course not, due to the fact that you would not be able to tell what does it cost? traffic each of your sites were receiving separately. So the same point could be said for tracking the money you make on your Azon Funnels web sites (and yet individuals still inform me they use only one Amazon monitoring ID for all their web sites/ facepalm). In the, past I have actually gone so far regarding produce 15 different monitoring ID's for usage on a single web site. By default Amazon designates you one monitoring ID like blahblahblah-20 but you can produce added tracking ID's right here. 10. Usage EasyAzon To Conserve Time And Also Make More Loan With Amazon.com. One of the means I've likewise been able to make great money with Amazon is to automatically occupy info from a WordPress plugin that I had actually developed based on the demands I had for constructing Amazon centric sites. The result was EasyAzon. The plugin enables you to insert information and also associate connect to Amazon in a much faster method than creating the links on your own manually from Amazon. Short Summary: Generally what the plugin does is enable you to swiftly place a text based affiliate web link, the image of the product as an associate link, a product information grid, transform United States Amazon links to UK, GR and so on using web link localization and so on etc. and have all those things be associate links to Amazon so it does a terrific job of improving click through rates. The plugin is presently just $47 and readily available at EasyAzon.com. 11. Put Acquire Currently Button Into Your Articles. This is something that EasyAzon might do for you, however if you do not want to spend the cash you can merely put your own buy currently button as well as transform it right into an Amazon associate link. 12. Produce An Item Comparison Grid. Creating an item contrast grid for all of the products within your particular niche and also allowing individuals to kind by different functions is a fantastic means to obtain some additional sales. I have actually utilized this method on several of my web sites and also the item contrast web page alone could add an additional 5% to 10% earnings boost for a site. If you do it by hand you'll need to use this WordPress plugin called WP Table Reloaded as well as exactly what I do is include different columns for info about the product and in the last column I utilize a buy currently button that individuals could click to see more details concerning the item. To grab some additional cents, register for Google AdSense. It most likely will not produce a lot of revenue, yet it's complimentary to sign up and completely uncomplicated to maintain. Establish reasonable expectations for revenues. You've just invested $20. You're going to make 5% on many items. That means that you have to offer $400 worth of stuff to make back your financial investment. To earn $20 a hr, what you write must generate $400 worth of acquisitions. You obtain credit score for various other acquisitions customers you send make while at Amazon.com besides simply the item you linked to, so it's not as tough as it might seem. It won't make you abundant, however it's not difficult to be profitable, and also it constructs in time.

In the end, you have to release the item to earn it live on your on-line shop. After publishing the item, you can check it on your web site.

Similarly, you could include even more products to your on the internet store and gain excellent compensations by advertising them. To conclude ultimately, we would just wish to point some minute Azon Funnels details you should pay heed while including and publishing affiliate items from Amazon.com.

Points to take care while promoting Amazon.com associate products:. Pick an eCommerce maximized style. This will help you to vary from an average e-store. We would recommend you to use eCommerce optimized themes like Wooshop as well as eCommerce. Constantly select products which have excellent testimonials from present clients. Always provide a correct item description. This assists the users to earn a quick judgment and also get the enlisted item. Setup your site with the necessary plugins. Your web site must load fast and also provide a fantastic reaction to the user. Do check your Amazon affiliate web link while advertising items. If you miss out on the associate tag, any type of items bought will not be counted in your associate control panel. Categorizing the items helps your individual to discover them quickly. It also helps in better conversion prices. Do give proper tags and appoint a pertinent group.

Think us, establishing an eCommerce store is not that difficult. The WooCommerce plugin has actually made it feasible for any person to configuration their on-line store. In the end, that doesn't want to make money! 13. Publish A Continual Bargains Blog Post. If you want to discover a means to be able to mention items that are on sale much more regularly on your web site one of the simplest methods I've done that in the past is to just do a regular deals blog post. So what I'll do is publish a post every week with the very best offers for my niche and after that integrate all the previous techniques I've talked about over to link to the items on Amazon.com. Depending on exactly how commonly you release short articles you could do it essentially regularly (I have actually seen some websites do these style of articles daily). 14. Release A Regular Monthly Bestseller Listing. Amazon has a bestseller web page located just at Amazon/ bestsellers and so one point I've done on my website is release a bestsellers listing as well as simply discuss the presently trending bestsellers. Typically talking the cream rises to the top so if you compose a write-up talking about the bestselling items those are likely to be the very best products your visitors are planning to get anyway. Simply go to Amazon/ bestsellers and try to find your corresponding specific niche classification. I strive top 5 or leading 10 items.

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#Azon Funnels #Azon Funnels review #Azon Funnels bonus #Azon Funnels discount

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tainghekhongdaycomvn · 6 years

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Faster, Fresher, Better: Announcing Link Explorer, Moz's New Link Building Tool

Posted by SarahBird

More link data. Fresher link data. Faster link data.

Today, I’m delighted to share that after eons of hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and love, Moz is taking a major step forward on our commitment to provide the best SEO tools money can buy.

We’ve rebuilt our link technology from the ground up and the data is now broadly available throughout Moz tools. It’s bigger, fresher, and much, much faster than our legacy link tech. And we’re just getting started! The best way to quickly understand the potential power of our revolutionary new link tech is to play with the beta of our Link Explorer.

Introducing Link Explorer, the newest addition to the Moz toolset!

We’ve heard your frustrations with Open Site Explorer and we know that you want more from Moz and your link building tools. OSE has done more than put in its time. Groundbreaking when it launched in 2008, it’s worked long and hard to bring link data to the masses. It deserves the honor of a graceful retirement.

OSE represents our past; the new Link Explorer is our fast, innovative, ambitious future.

Here are some of my favorite things about the Link Explorer beta:

It’s 20x larger and 30x fresher than OSE (RIP)

Despite its huge index size, the app is lightning fast! I can’t stand waiting so this might be my number-one fav improvement.

We’re introducing Link Tracking Lists to make managing your link building efforts a breeze. Sometimes the simple things make the biggest difference, like when they started making vans with doors on each side. You’ll never go back.

Link Explorer includes historic data, a painful gap in OSE. Studying your gained/lost linking domains is fast and easy.

The new UX surfaces competitive insights much more quickly

Increases the size and freshness of the index improved the quality of Domain Authority and Spam Score. Voilà.

All this, and we’re only in beta.

Dive into your link data now!

Here’s a deeper dive into my favorites:

#1: The sheer size, quality, and speed of it all

We’re committed to data quality. Here are some ways that shows up in the Moz tools:

When we collect rankings, we evaluate the natural first page of rankings to ensure that the placement and content of featured snippets and other SERP features are correctly situated (as can happen when ranking are collected in 50- or 100-page batches). This is more expensive, but we think the tradeoff is worth it.

We were the first to build a hybrid search volume model using clickstream data. We still believe our model is the most accurate.

Our SERP corpus, which powers Keywords by Site, is completely refreshed every two weeks. We actively update up to 15 million of the keywords each month to remove keywords that are no longer being searched and replace them with trending keywords and terms. This helps keep our keyword data set fresh and relevant.

The new Link Explorer index extends this commitment to data quality. OSE wasn’t cutting it and we’re thrilled to unleash this new tech.

Link Explorer is over 20x larger and 30x fresher than our legacy link index. Bonus points: the underlying technology is very cost-efficient, making it much less expensive for us to scale over time. This frees up resources to focus on feature delivery. BOOM!

One of my top pet peeves is waiting. I feel physical pain while waiting in lines and for apps to load. I can’t stand growing old waiting for a page to load (amirite?).

The new Link Explorer app is delightfully, impossibly fast. It’s like magic. That’s how link research should be. Magical.

#2: Historical data showing discovered and lost linking domains

If you’re a visual person, this report gives you an immediate idea of how your link building efforts are going. A spike you weren't expecting could be a sign of spam network monkey business. Deep-dive effortlessly on the links you lost and gained so you can spend your valuable time doing thoughtful, human outreach.

#3: Link Tracking Lists

Folks, this is a big one. Throw out (at least one of... ha. ha.) those unwieldy spreadsheets and get on board with Link Tracking Lists, because these are the future. Have you been chasing a link from a particular site? Wondering if your outreach emails have borne fruit yet? Want to know if you’ve successfully placed a link, and how you’re linking? Link Tracking Lists cut out a huge time-suck when it comes to checking back on which of your target sites have actually linked back to you.

Why announce the beta today?

We’re sharing this now for a few reasons:

The new Link Explorer data and app have been available in beta to a limited audience. Even with a quiet, narrow release, the SEO community has been talking about it and asking good questions about our plans. Now that the Link Explorer beta is in broad release throughout all of Moz products and the broader Moz audience can play with it, we’re expecting even more curiosity and excitement.

If you’re relying on our legacy link technology, this is further notice to shift your applications and reporting to the new-and-improved tech. OSE will be retired soon! We’re making it easier for API customers to get the new data by providing a translation layer for the legacy API.

We want and need your feedback. We are committed to building the very best link building tool on the planet. You can expect us to invest heavily here. We need your help to guide our efforts and help us make the most impactful tradeoffs. This is your invitation to shape our roadmap.

Today’s release of our new Link Explorer technology is a revolution in Moz tools, not an evolution. We’ve made a major leap forward in our link index technology that delivers a ton of immediate value to Moz customers and the broader Moz Community.

Even though there are impactful improvements around the corner, this ambitious beta stands on its own two feet. OSE wasn’t cutting it and we’re proud of this new, fledgling tech.

What’s on the horizon for Link Explorer?

We’ve got even more features coming in the weeks and months ahead. Please let us know if we’re on the right track.

Link Building Assistant: a way to quickly identify new link acquisition opportunities

A more accurate and useful Link Intersect feature

Link Alerts to notify you when you get a link from a URL you were tracking in a list

Changes to how we count redirects: Currently we don't count links to a redirect as links to the target of the redirect (that's a lot of redirects), but we have this planned for the future.

Significantly scaling up our crawling to further improve freshness and size

Go forth, and explore:

Try the new Link Explorer!

Tomorrow Russ Jones will be sharing a post that discusses the importance of quality metrics when it comes to a link index, and don’t miss our pinned Q&A post answering questions about Domain Authority and Page Authority changes or our FAQ in the Help Hub.

We’ll be releasing early and often. Watch this space, and don’t hold back your feedback. Help us shape the future of Links at Moz. We’re listening!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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