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Articles I Like: 10 breakthrough technologies this year

The PolyBlog
March 1 2018

Technology Review has released their list for “10 Breakthrough Technologies” for 2018. It’s hard to argue with the list having some important developments in it:

  • 3-D printing with metal — this could drastically disrupt manufacturing and give rise to lighter, stronger parts;
  • Artificial embryos — not exactly coming to a lab near you, but basically creating an embryo from another cell without an egg or sperm…great for research, but the ethical issues haven’t been worked out;
  • Smart-design for urban settings — using sensing technology and integrating tech into high-end design has always been part of the “future” in various sci-fi movies, but Quayside in Toronto will make some of it a reality;
  • Dueling neural networks — computer AI’s are bad at “creating”, but new techniques teaching them to learn off each other is creating a pseudo creativity with amazing applications for modelling, virtual entertainment, design, etc.;
  • Babelfish earbuds — auto translation in an earbud is great in theory, but I’m not convinced it will move out of the tourist zone as rapidly as some claim, particularly as early designs by no less than Google have been pretty clunky;
  • Zero-carbon natural gas — obviously, it’s still a non-renewable fuel, but having a clean version with no GHG emissions would be amazing, even if “Net Power’s technology won’t solve all the problems with natural gas, particularly on the extraction side. But as long as we’re using natural gas, we might as well use it as cleanly as possible.”;
  • Perfect Online Privacy through zero-knowledge proof — the idea is that you can provide “proof” of something (age, financial balance) without actually providing access…not quite a simple “proxy”, more like a cryptographic tool that says “You want to check if that record over there shows the person is over 18? Let me ask it”, and rather than performing the check itself, the cryptography gets the yes/no without seeing the original data…kind of like PayPal on steroids, but that doesn’t solve all the privacy issues online, it just makes the anonymous transparency of blockchains a bit more practical;
  • Genetic Fortune-Telling — the ethical issues of using DNA to predict health issues or even IQ are ridiculously bad, and based on the discrepancies in DNA testing for geneology, it can make economics look like a pure science; and,
  • Quantum leaps — building quantum computers is one thing, figuring out what to do with one is another…but modelling of molecules for design seems like a great first use.

However, for me, the one “breakthrough” that I think will affect us the most is the one the magazine dubs “AI for Everybody”:

Artificial intelligence has so far been mainly the plaything of big tech companies like Amazon, Baidu, Google, and Microsoft, as well as some startups. For many other companies and parts of the economy, AI systems are too expensive and too difficult to implement fully.

Machine-learning tools based in the cloud are bringing AI to a far broader audience. So far, Amazon dominates cloud AI with its AWS subsidiary. Google is challenging that with TensorFlow, an open-source AI library that can be used to build other machine-learning software. Recently Google announced Cloud AutoML, a suite of pre-trained systems that could make AI simpler to use.

Microsoft, which has its own AI-powered cloud platform, Azure, is teaming up with Amazon to offer Gluon, an open-source deep-learning library. Gluon is supposed to make building neural nets—a key technology in AI that crudely mimics how the human brain learns—as easy as building a smartphone app.

…

Currently AI is used mostly in the tech industry, where it has created efficiencies and produced new products and services. But many other businesses and industries have struggled to take advantage of the advances in artificial intelligence. Sectors such as medicine, manufacturing, and energy could also be transformed if they were able to implement the technology more fully, with a huge boost to economic productivity.

Most companies, though, still don’t have enough people who know how to use cloud AI. So Amazon and Google are also setting up consultancy services. Once the cloud puts the technology within the reach of almost everyone, the real AI revolution can begin.

You’ll want to keep an eye on these 10 breakthrough technologies this year | Technology Review

My only disagreement with the last one is the timing. They argue it’s available now, partly based on things like Siri and Alexa invading homes. Combined with the dueling neural networks, there are great things to be accomplished. I just don’t think they’re as close as they optimistically project they are already.

Posted in Computers | Tagged advances, article, breakthroughs, curation, disruption, technology | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid

The PolyBlog
November 12 2017

I’ve been going through some of my saved/bookmarked pages, and I came across this one from April Hamilton from back in July 2011. It’s a great summary of some problems that newbie writers (like me) have with dialogue (Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid).

So it mentions that newbies often have the characters talking the same way i.e. with the same “voice”, which doesn’t happen in real life and is really boring to read. I’m not sure I like her examples of fixing it, as it starts to sound a bit cliché to have 20-somethings or ex-military people talk like caricatures, but it can give flavour to their voice. Equally, newbies often go for melodramatic scenes that are tripe for soap operas, or heavy on the exposition dump. And I like the overall premise of “when in doubt, read it out loud”. If it sounds wrong, it probably is.

However, I’m not sold on the third trap related to newbies not differentiating enough between men and women. Here’s the excerpt:

In the masculine, words are used to accomplish some goal. The goal is usually imparting necessary—and that word, “necessary”, is key here—information, but it can also be to quickly size up a person or situation, or to establish or reinforce the pecking order (e.g., teasing). Generally speaking, believable masculine characters talk less than feminine characters, and get to the point pretty quickly.

With feminine characters, a given conversation need not have an intrinsic point: the point of the conversation may simply be for the feminine characters to hear and be heard, and feel validated by one another as a result. But having said that, I’d caution against too much mutual navel-gazing on the part of your feminine characters, lest you bore your readers.

That is overly-simplistic in my view and belies people who have great success going the opposite way — Robert B. Parker’s Spenser for Hire is very direct in terms of actions, but he also has long conversations of introspection with his psychologist girlfriend. Equally, Susan Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone never has conversations that are about being heard. For me, I think the advice is more around distinctive voice…while there is a risk of newbies making their female characters sound like men or men like women, a greater risk is they start making them sound like caricatures or stereotypes instead. Dialogue should move the plot along, not just give an excuse for navel-gazing or the author a chance for social commentary or self-therapy. If you sprinkle some of the other elements moderately in to give them a distinctive voice, it usually reads better IMHO.

In the meantime, I liked the article…

Posted in Writing and Publishing | Tagged advice, article, curation, dialogue, writing | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: Thoughts on the publishing industry in Canada

The PolyBlog
December 16 2016

Back in September, Carla Douglas published an article on the website “Publishing Perspectives” interviewing Merilyn Simonds on the state of publishing in Canada (A Leader in Canadian Writing Takes Stock of Self-Publishing). When I saw the title, I thought, “Cool, must read that.” Then I saw Simonds’ former job as chair of The Writers Union of Canada and thought, “Oh. Maybe not.”

I am not a giant fan of TWUC or their approaches to some issues. Like the Author’s Guild in the U.S., many of the members are sheep who think the publishing world is still flat and haven’t noticed that Amazon’s disruption was in giving authors the opportunity to bypass traditional publishing and go direct to readers, often with not only greater ease of access but also greater revenues. This of course is the 3rd sign of the Apocalypse for the Author’s Guild who surprisingly support the position of agents and publishers on issues almost 1:1. Considering those three groups have some issues that divide them pretty substantially for self-interest, the alignment is often puzzling at best or frustrating in the mild or infuriating in the worst.

So I almost didn’t read the article. Kind of a “yep, read that, got the narrow view t-shirt, thanks”. But I did read it, and was pleasantly surprised that she was more open about the two groups (indie and traditionally-published authors) learning from each other and the strong importance of small presses as an option. The article is worth reading for those aspects alone.

Which is not to say that it isn’t a bit off. She notes that TWUC opened up to self-publishing authors, which was controversial, but few joined. Her conclusion was that they were not interested in issues like copyright, contracts or rights. It is that view which would stop most from joining. Of course they are interested, they just don’t think TWUC has anything to offer them that will help with that. Particularly when most of the members have signed their rights over to large publishers for the next 100 years. If you see an organization whose members have traditionally been screwed repeatedly, you might not flock to them to ask for their advice on how to get the same treatment.

I completely disagree however with her that “Self-publishing puts your head in the marketplace, and that’s no place for a writer’s creative process. You need to separate being a writer and being published.”

That is one of the first failures of authors — treating themselves as “l’artiste”, embracing the muse, etc. No, they’re self-employed business people producing content for people to consume. If you lose sight of that, you’re likely to end up with lots of fun attending conferences, participating in small writing groups with friends, drinking wine, and never being published. It doesn’t mean you “write to the market” trying to capture the latest genre or marrying Harry Potter with 50 Shades of Gray, but it does mean you need to be thinking of the market as your eventual destination, not simply satisfying your desire to write drivel.

I do agree with her though that self-publishing is not necessarily a DIY affair, and that in most cases, hiring someone to do layout and cover design is highly worth it. I am of mixed mind on some types of external editing, as there are as many horror stories as there are success stories, with lots of “meh” in between. I like the idea of a professional substantive review for feedback and copyediting, but detailed revisions back and forth with an external editor can create the impetus for diminishing returns. I love reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s business blog, and the editing laments are often included as an aside — such as the editor who edits out voice, and substitutes their own.

However, I have absolutely no idea on what planet Simonds is living when it comes to digital — while she notes that indies should learn about contracts and rights, she then says “Ebook royalty rates are very low”. Umm, no, they’re not. The ebook rate through Amazon is better by far than authors see for print, and it is one of the best out there. If she is seeing low royalty rates, she’s looking at the wrong publishers (perhaps vanity ones or, gasp, traditional).

But I still liked the article. 🙂

Posted in Writing and Publishing | Tagged article, Canada, publishing, writing | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: Tips on how to be happy

The PolyBlog
May 9 2012

There are lots of gurus out there who offer tips on “how to be happy”, with most of them stressing the importance of finding your “one true passion”, or if you prefer the model espoused by Jack Palance in “City Slickers” to Billy Crystal, looking for your “one thing”. However, there are other gurus who suggest aiming not for the moon, but for the little incremental steps you can take each day as you go about your daily routine. An article on Success Magazine’s site follows this latter technique, and looks at different ways to try and improve your state of mind in the short-term. My reaction is below, but first, let’s start with some excerpts.

Gregg Steinberg, author of the best-selling self-help book Full Throttle says, “Happiness in everyday life is all about mastering our emotions. You can be miserable even when you are successful, and you can be happy even if you are not successful. Your emotional mastery is key to your happiness.”
…
Melanie Greenberg, a licensed clinical and health psychologist who has a Psychology Today blog called “The Mindful Self-Express,” believes that writing a gratitude diary is one of the “ingredients of a healthy, balanced life.”…Close your eyes and focus on the feelings of gratitude that these things bring you. Really breathe and absorb the feeling of being helped and supported.
…
Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one day on a cross-town bus when she found herself asking, “What do I want from life, anyway?” The result is both a top-selling memoir and a popular blog titled The Happiness Project, where she writes about the tools and techniques necessary to achieve the ideal state of bliss. For one thing, she has started compiling a list of the “bare minimum” things we should do on a daily basis in order to be happy and healthy.

You can read the full set of tips via Boost Your Mood: 23 Ways to Up Your Love of Life | SUCCESS Magazine (link expired).

I’m a bit agnostic about the wording of the first excerpt about mastering your emotions. I think it is more about mastering your thinking process, more in line with traditional behaviour therapy techniques. In other words, finding alternate ways to interpret things and thus having that guide your emotions rather than trying to “master your emotions”. If, for example, your reaction to being “cheated on” is to get really angry, that’s not necessarily an emotion you need to master. It’s actually appropriate if your line of thinking was that it is the most personal of injuries from a trusted intimate partner. On the other hand, if you get really angry if someone gives you flowers, that’s an emotion that needs to be mastered cuz there’s an inappropriate reaction going on. In the first instance, though, most behaviour therapists would look at why the cheating is making you “so” angry that you can’t function or that you want to hurt the person in return. Is it because you have other buttons that are being pushed? Is it a violation of your core principles? Are you angry at yourself for feeling “duped”? Only by understanding those logic chains of thought will you be able to change the way your body interprets them and reacts to them.

The second excerpt, the gratitude journal, is an interesting way to do something that most spiritual advisors would simply list as “count your blessings”. It is something that has been on my mind of late, as I attempt my spiritual journey this year. I am not a great believer in the power of “prayer” per se, but I like the idea of saying “grace” before meals more. Probably in a completely non-denominational way, and not as a blessing of the food, but of an opportunity to just take a moment to reflect on your, well, for lack of a better word, blessings. Is “gratitudes” a proper word, i.e. things you are grateful for? 🙂

The final excerpt, on day-to-day increments, resonates pretty strongly with me as it is in many ways a key part of my goal-setting overall. Living a conscious life, mindful of our daily choices, and daily habits. And recognizing that little steps on some things you feel are important is just as empowering as achieving big huge goals too. I’ll have to check out her other offerings on the web.

Posted in Goals | Tagged article, goals, happiness, personal | Leave a reply

Articles I Like: When to give up a goal

The PolyBlog
May 8 2012

Dorie Clark over at the Harvard Business Review site posted an interesting article on when to give up on a goal without feeling like a quitter. My reaction after the excerpt:

Goal setting can be powerful. It’s important to periodically look at your priorities and ensure you’re doing the things that matter, whether it’s seeing friends, getting healthy, or making more sales calls. But it’s equally important to re-evaluate those goals to ensure they’re still appropriate:

When your goals have adverse consequences
When your goals impede other objectives
When your goals are no longer appropriate.

See the full blog entry via When to Give Up on Your Goals – Dorie Clark – Harvard Business Review.

I like the article as it raises an important question for me — if I have lots of goals, when do I give up on a goal? But my reaction is a bit different.

At first blush, I thought the article was missing a couple of nuances for me. First, most importantly, all goals should be constantly evaluated, broken down into sub-components objectives, and the resulting tasks become priorities. So, you review your priorities daily or weekly, your objectives perhaps quarterly, and your goals annually. But for me, life is about the journey too, so if I miss a priority or an objective or even a goal, I’m not upset about it (usually). After all, the first goal is to have goals/objectives/priorities and to make progress on some of them — which I do. So if my first goal is met, how would I feel like a quitter?

Second, when I review my goals, I see how I did against past goals, but I focus on what I’m going to do for the coming year. And not all my goals can make it. So quitting on a goal isn’t a problem because it is all about priority-setting. If a goal has dropped in priority for me, such as because it’s producing adverse consequences, impeding other goals, or just not as appropriate, it automatically drops in priority. Eventually, it will drop off the list entirely.

My two best examples of that were law school and a job in a Deputy Minister’s Office. When I neared graduation from my undergrad, I didn’t completely know what I wanted to do — something public administration-related, probably municipal government, was my main thought. But I thought I would do a joint degree with law and have this great law degree to further my public administration ambitions. I thought about just doing law by itself, but I was more interested in public admin. The joint degree allowed me to do both.

Except when I went to law school, I really hated it. At the time, I didn’t really know why, but I was just not enjoying it. And that isn’t just a reflection of the work. I mean I couldn’t care two rat’s asses worth of anything about certain legal areas — torts and property law being the biggest. Anything to do with government, I was interested and actively doing my readings. Anything to do with business entities, snooze-a-rama. About six months in, we read a case that crystallized part of the problem with the cases for me. The short version is that after a particularly disheartening discussion by my fellow classmates, the professor asked me afterwards if I had as much trouble with the case as she suspected. When I confessed that the other students’ view of the case really really bothered me, she pointed out that part of the reason for that was that I was still seeing the people in the case. While my peers had indoctrinated themselves in the mystique of law school where you tease out the various abstract legal principles, I was still feeling an injustice of an 80-year-old British property case. The windmills that I wanted to tilt at were long gone, dead and buried even, and here I was arguing about them. But in most of the government-related cases, the “entities” were still alive — the government institutions. And the cases were as much about law as they were about how governments work, organize themselves, and exercise their power.

Fast-forward another eight months, and in the intervening time, I had spent six months working for a government department doing legal summaries and research (and loving it) and started my public administration courses (and loving ALL of them). I got a co-op job a few months later, started taking “stop-out” time from the law school…two years later, I dropped law school from my life altogether.

My second example was a job in the DM’s office of a government Ministry. I had worked for about 8 years for government at this point, and I was a level three program officer when an advertisement came out looking for a level five or six officer to work in the DM’s office in the same department. It seemed like my dream job — high-level policy stuff, good overview work, cabinet relations duties, a chance to have my finger on the pulse of government, however obliquely. But I was too junior and didn’t apply. In other departments, those jobs are hot competitions; in my department, nobody wanted it. So they advertised again, and I said, “Well, I would be interested but the language profile is too high and the level is too high…”. They interviewed me and ended up offering me the job.

But the cost of taking it would have been too high — no more career development, no more rotation, and I’d have to burn a bridge with my current boss on short notice. A mentor pointed out that nobody in the department wants those types of jobs, so if I waited until later, the jobs would always be available for someone with my background, and leaving my current post then would really burn my current boss. And so I turned it down. I couldn’t believe it…I even said at the time, “If you had told me even three years ago that I would not only get offered this job but also would turn it down, I would have said you were crazy”. But it wasn’t the right fit right then.

Fast-forward another five years, and I took a similar job in the same office at a much higher level, with more responsibilities, more flexibility, more work in the areas I like. My seeming dream job. And I hated it.

Like with law school, it was a goal of mine to work there. But goals are often set with ideals in mind, and the reality may be quite different. For me, law school was not what I expected — not in a naive way, but rather the experience of law school was trying to train me to look at the world in a way that I didn’t want. I couldn’t eat just part of the fruit of knowledge, it was all-consuming. But it wasn’t me then or who I am now, and I bailed. And for a long time I did feel like I had failed myself. Yet, years later, I read an assignment I had written for an undergrad law class where the intro resonated me in ways I couldn’t have predicted previously…I wrote, “I know the assignment was to go and watch a legal case unfold, like a traffic stop or DUI. Then to summarize the bare legal essentials in the case, with facts and legal issues identified. But that wasn’t what interested me in my research — I want instead to talk about the people and how they interacted together to reach a resolution.” That’s the reason I left law school, written two years before I even went to law school. I wasn’t “quitting” law school, I was being true to myself.

Similarly with the DM’s office job. There was nothing wrong with the job, it just wasn’t what I had hoped for when I pursued it. I had hoped for a lot more high-level understanding of policy discussions, value-added to the unit as the first senior policy analyst. Yet much of the work at that level is surprisingly administrative, superficial even. It was high-level, I learned a lot, but eight months later when I won another competition at a newly created department, the opportunity to manage a team and create an international framework for them almost from scratch was too irresistible to pass up. It even ended up being a good timeline for moving on. Others have done the job after me, and loved it. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with the job…but the reality was different from the ideal. So even though that was a goal I “accomplished”, it was not a success.

One goal missed, but still success; one goal accomplished, but not a success.

In the end, I think the real question about the goals is whether they are still actually your goals? Or are they simply leftover “scripts” that you are following? And do you really know what that goal means or is it just an ideal you’re pursuing?

Posted in Goals | Tagged article, failure, give up, goals, personal | Leave a reply

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