uncertainty crises skill
I was feeling pretty good about the progress I’d made in the craft of writing — but then I read the first few pages of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers.
In a recent re-arranging of office and library, the book had jumped into my hand: ‘remember me? This was set aside for later. It’s later’.
You can read all the kudos about it yourself but, for me, it’s a lesson in how to write and I shall enjoy finishing it.
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If you’re into reading e-books, you might want to click on this link from booktalk’s bookbub
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music compilations of jazz for studying, reading and working
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jCyFVgmSSo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsD_yczGIg8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9iWFHw5K84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn7Iwtf50FE
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https://qz.com/886038/isaac-asimov-wrote-almost-500-books-in-his-lifetime-these-are-the-6-ways-he-did-it/
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There are lots of lessons in writing on my bookshelves, including the course of writing creative nonfiction and the as-yet-unfinished brilliant-but-difficult-to-slog-through Building Great Sentences.
And the fifty-odd books on the craft, plus all the handbooks, thesauri, dictionaries, and other tools. And the 45 e-mails from writing craft groups tucked away for safe-keeping. And the list of writing “assignments” from within the book The Butterfly Hours, whose author Patty Dann taught a class at a local writer’s collaborative.
I added sixteeen of the topics listed on pages 128-129 to my own personal file of topics to write about; so far I’ve finished five of them.
Here’s one:
http://www.daskeyboard.com/blog/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Duplex-Typewriter-Jewett-Antique-Typewriters-284×300.jpg
My functionality with the typewriter started in high school, the easy (?) elective of touch typing class in which I labored but never really learned. I could not break myself of the habit of having to look at the keys, nor could I master using more than one finger and one thumb per hand. I did not have a typewriter at home; all high school papers were done in cursive.
Today, cursive is a dinosaur.
Today, typewriters are a dinosaur.
Soon, even typing will be a thing of the past.
http://www.svsd.net/cms/lib5/PA01001234/Centricity/Domain/831/class_old.jpg
I made a significant leap forward when I worked the graveyard shift in college for a telephone answering service. While there was some limited ability for sleep, I used the time — the phones went silent except for important calls from the hospital to the physicians, or calls for urgent service by towtrucks, or when the ambulance company was out on a call and I had to answer the line — to type up my college papers. I got through much of high school and almost all of college on the ability to write an expository paper. They had to be typed. And my employer had an IBM Selectric.
All I had to do was to pay for the ribbons.
http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTM2MlgxNDEz/z/5~MAAOSwaG9XJT1g/$_35.JPG?set_id=2
By the time I got out of college, society’s approach to letters was changing. Some genius who worked for An Wang created the word processor:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/f2/75/26/f27526d94676fc4338bf445c17cf285b.jpg
My father, who tracked job markets for the state department of commerce, wrote to the company on behalf of my niece, then in high school, to ask the company what the new tool was all about. He got an answer, which I preserved in my archives somewhere, from some recent high school grad who worked for the p.r. department at the company in Lowell, MA whose office towers still command a major gateway to the city.
The letter is a classic. It will probably bring serious dollars on an Antique Roadshow in the year 2035.
The company has long since fallen to the vagaries of competition and change, but the basic functionality of the word processing system is that the typist could make changes to the document before it got printed, thus eliminating typographic errors, bad grammar, and even bad writing. The letter is a classic because it was produced on a Wang 1200 but had so many examples of typographical errors, bad grammar and bad writing that it seemed like a parody of itself.
I first used a Wang word processor right after I took the job marketing a medical symposium; with a Wang WP, I could print out individually-typed-and-addrerssed letters to hundreds and hundreds of addresses. My bosses thought I was a wizard. I needed only to sit by and maintain the feed, pull off the product, fold it up, and stuff it into the envelopes. Some fellow named Nierenberg ( Andrea’s father ) had already taught me the value and art of personalized direct marketing. Soon thereafter, I was running a one-day seminar to introduce computers to physicians; I was utterly dumbfounded when some of the brightest people I’d ever known would only very tentatively approach the subject or even touch the input device. They were mini-masters at trauma surgery but how to make a brain-in-a-box sing and dance was new to them.
Sometime thereafter I went to worked for a start-up producing cable TV shows for pediatricians and the company handed me the latest in IBM computers; I never could figure out to use the damn thing. But that never held me back; we got 15 shows in the can and I was already at work on a new franchise for orthopaedic surgeons when they informed me that I was fired because I’d failed to sell enough air time to advertisers, a task that was nowhere mentioned in my job description.
A few years later, I took over running an association of business executives who worked for companies like Prime and Digital Equipment. On the first two days of the job, the office staff told me the annual invoices for membership (the organization’s first and major source of income) were due to go out and the DEC system with its 10-inch floppies couldn’t be made to merge the membership database with the invoice form. Calls to the nearby company proved useless; the technical support staffer sent over by our very own internal contact through our vice president and their international director proved useless.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Macintosh_128k_transparency.png/200px-Macintosh_128k_transparency.png
A quick phone call and some research turned up the idea that we could buy an Apple Mcintosh with custom-made software for association management tasks for $5,000 proved irresistible, thus earning me enmity with the Board that I could never outrun.
The Mac ran faultlessly for the 14 months I was there. The invoices were sent out with a three-day delay, thus saving the corporation’s sizeable capital equity, enough so they could purchase an office condo after I left, but I got run out on a rail.
But I had found Apple, bought two for my kids to use in high school and later college, and when my son moved out of the house in his senior year, I had a tool I could learn to use on my desk. I wish I’d had the cash to buy stock. Sorry, Joe.
When I again found myself unemployed because I’d mastered a DOS computyer so well that I made more money at ten cents a line than my department director, I started drafting an e-book on performance psychology.
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I once met a girl (or should I say she once met me?), and we talked until two and then she said it’s time for bed and crawled off to sleep (if she could) surrounded by her daughter and her dog.
But while she was awake, she convinved me to take a Briggs-Myers psychometric test that, when it was completed, told me I was an iNTp who loves play, languages, and complex systems, amd specially games that coax analogies, patterns and theories from the unseen. So it’s no surprise that I’ve had a fascination for wargaming. One of those nights we talked about her desire to run off 900 miles on a whim to help take care of people in a major disaster, but I talked her out of it. It took me two hours, after which she challenged me (nop, she held my feet to the fire until it was finished and found a home) to write this.
Some people think this nation is headed into a crisis larger than any its faced in 80 years (a major disaster), and the world has changed a lot since the Depression era. See the three articles below or scroll quickly through the last handful of entries at Occurrences Foreign & Domestic.
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https://www.oathkeepers.org/crisis-end-kurt-schlichter-lays-lefts-violent-endgame/
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/planetary-lockdown-geoengineering-and-the-deep-state/5574404
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http://thewellpreparedmama.com/52-survival-skills-your-kids-should-be-learning/
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No matter how your glasses are tinted, I’m just going to park these here for easy access and safe-keeping so I (and you) can watch them at your leisure.
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Crisis Management Wargaming (4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr_1O75185o
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The Secret to Successful Crisis Management in the 21st Century – Melissa Agnes TEDx Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQGEPEaEWtg (18)
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How to write the best crisis management plan for your business by Tony Ridley (13)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seO-GJ7J0G4
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Better Risk Assessments, Management, Tools and Metrics by Tony Ridley (15)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD2mQ6ooYO4
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How to Conduct a Tabletop Exercise (18)
A tutorial for campus administrators and crisis response team members
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XK_dZkb9Kw
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https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=incident+management+simulation
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At the Wargaming Table: Tactics – Strategy – Game Theory (40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUOJBCmqGcY
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In this lecture during the 2013 Yale Presidential Inauguration Symposia, University Provost Polak offers a sample of his popular undergraduate economics course. As the William C. Brainard Professor of Economics, he is an expert on decision theory, game theory, and economic history. His work explores how individuals choose when faced with uncertainty and how societies choose when faced with inequality.
[67 minutes]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3oWYHYoBvk
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“Ceptre: A Language for Modeling Generative Interactive Systems” by Chris Martens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFeJZRdhKcI
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“I See What You Mean”
by Peter Alvaro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Aa4PivG0g
I love query languages for many reasons, but mostly because of their semantics. Wait, come back! In contrast to most systems programming languages (whose semantics can be quite esoteric), the semantics of a query (given some inputs) are precisely its outcome — rows in tables. Hence when we write a query, we directly engage with its semantics: we simply say what we mean. This makes it easy and natural to reason about whether our queries are correct: that is, whether they mean what we intended them to mean.
Query languages have traditionally been applied to a relatively narrow domains: historically, data at rest in data stores; more recently, data in motion through continuous, “streaming” query frameworks. Why stop here? Could query languages do for a notoriously complex domain such as distributed systems programming what they have done so successfully for data management? How would they need to evolve to become expressive enough to capture the programs that we need to write, while retaining a simple enough semantics to allow mere mortals to reason about their correctness?
I will attempt to answer these questions (and raise many others) by describing a query language for distributed programming called Dedalus. Like traditional query languages, Dedalus abstracts away many of the details we typically associate with programming, making data and time first-class citizens and relegating computation to a subordinate role, characterizing how data is allowed to change as it moves through space and time. As we will see, this shift allows programmers to directly reason about distributed correctness properties such as consistency and fault-tolerance, and lays the foundations for powerful program analysis and repair tools (such as Blazes and LDFI), as well as successive generations of data-centric programming languages (including Bloom, Edelweiss and Eve).
Peter Alvaro
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ
@palvaro
Peter Alvaro is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research focuses on using data-centric languages and analysis techniques to build and reason about data-intensive distributed systems, in order to make them scalable, predictable and robust to the failures and nondeterminism endemic to large-scale distribution. Peter is the creator of the Dedalus language and co-creator of the Bloom language.
While pursuing his PhD at while UC Berkeley, Peter co-developed and taught Programming the Cloud, an undergraduate course that explored distributed systems concepts through the lens of software development. Prior to attending Berkeley, Peter worked as a Senior Software Engineer in the data analytics team at Ask.com. Peter’s principal research interests are databases, distributed systems and programming languages.
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http://www.techrepublic.com/article/understanding-the-differences-between-ai-machine-learning-and-deep-learning/
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https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/
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http://edutips.eu
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https://qz.com/911681/we-tested-apples-siri-amazon-echos-alexa-microsofts-cortana-and-googles-google-home-to-see-which-personal-assistant-bots-stand-up-for-themselves-in-the-face-of-sexual-harassment/
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http://www.cohack.life/posts/what-is-transcendence-technology/
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