Are you stuck in the transitional phase where you can see yourself as an author? Elisabeth talks about the exciting news regarding her book and progress in the revision process. They also talk about the dangers that exist for people trying to publish in the form of vanity publishers and how to steer clear of scams.
“Wikimedia and Facebook have given Angolans free access to their websites, but not to the rest of the internet. So, naturally, Angolans have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups, creating a totally free and clandestine file sharing network in a country where mobile internet data is extremely expensive…”
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss the how apocalyptic religious movements become religions, insider and outsider language, the uniqueness of christianities, their ongoing personal revelations about privilege, and the intertextuality of Trump.
“In case there was any doubt that messaging apps were the future of communication in the mobile-first era, a new study released this morning puts some solid numbers behind their traction – and their increasing dominance over email, among today’s youngest users. According to a report from App Annie, email is effectively dying among this crowd. Those aged 13 to 24 now spend more than 3.5 times overall usage time in messaging apps than those over 45 years old, while the older users still default to apps that replicate desktop functions, like email and web browsers.“
Forget building out an iPhone or Android app for your group, organization, or church. We’re (re)entering the age of messaging. If you want to remain (or become) relevant, you’re going to have to have a presence there.
Fear not, there are some great services out there such as AppyPie or Chatfuel to help you configure your messaging app (currently only works with Telegram but coming soon to Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Kik, Viber, and Slack).
But yes, messaging is the next iteration of social networking / SMS / email / web communications as we transition rapidly to a mobile-first computing environment… old conventions such as web browsers or email clients aren’t going to be the center of that experience, and neither will traditional “one size fits all” apps. Or as Chatfuel’s site says, “Chatbots are the new apps.”
“Here’s a sure sign of spring, and that Facebook is changing the way marketers create ads… The whole idea is in keeping with the idea of silent movies becoming the future, or at least a future, of advertising. Folks who want to stick around and turn on the sound will get to see and hear steak sizzling. DDB San Francisco is the agency.”
“We haven’t had this kind of transformation since television came in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s,” says Marc Pritchard, the marketing boss at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser. Grappling with these challenges, however, may spur a shift in the industry’s structure. There will always be startups, particularly because technology changes so quickly. But on the whole, power is likely to move to fewer, larger companies.”
DocStoc is now dead, which I knew was coming. What I didn’t realize is that I had linked to so many pages there (including a few of my own like a paper on Julian of Norwich that had around 3,500 views last time I checked a few months back. I’ve got a plugin configured here to alert me when something I’ve linked to either changes url’s or goes away. I’m getting more and more of these lately. Linkrot / Webrot is real and sad. Thanks, Facebook.
Developed by Microsoft’s research division, Tay is a virtual friend with behaviors informed by the web chatter of some 18–24-year-olds and the repartee of a handful of improvisational comedians (Microsoft declined to name them). Her purpose, unlike AI-powered virtual assistants like Facebook’s M, is almost entirely to amuse. And Tay does do that: She is simultaneously entertaining, infuriating, manic, and irreverent.
“Holistic local SEO campaigns are the best for providing long-term value because the results won’t disappear immediately if you stop working with the agency. They also offer an element of education that you could argue is the most valuable of all.
While these services can seem a bit costly, they’re worth their price in every aspect. They’re highly targeted campaigns run by thoughtful local SEO technicians who know how to focus on getting results. The investment into these campaigns typically ranges from $899 to $ 1,999 per month depending on the company, their specific offerings and the business’s overall goals.”
We work with a number of businesses, organizations, and even churches on what can be defined as “holistic” SEO programs to increase their site’s effectiveness at reaching desired potential customers or interactions at the local level.
There are some great “automated” services where you can “set it and forget it” and pay a monthly fee to do your search optimization as the article points out (Moz Local, Synup, Yext etc). We’ve steered a few of our clients in that direction given their budget, goals, or scope of demographics. The same goes with building a site… there are great solutions such as Squarespace or even WordPress.com for building your own website on the cheap, and sometimes that’s a better solution (I’d stay away from Wix or Weebly because of the way those site generators perform in Google searches, but that’s just me).
However, if you want the real trifecta of successful results, you have to hire an expert (which is what we do):
Education from Expert Consultations (most important)
Focus on Real Results for Long Term
Customization for Your Specific Goals
You simply can’t get that with DIY programs.
I often see advertisements for website builders or newsletter delivery solutions or business card designers / makers that promise “ease of use” and “success” for small businesses or organizations working on shoestring budgets. It’s tempting to consider using those, especially when you are starting out or looking to make the jump to the next plateau. Sometimes, that’s a wise move. More often than not, you realize a few months into your endeavors that it would have been better to “hire an agency” or an expert to help you both clarify your goals as well as implement a site or newsletter or business card design that is both professional and custom to your needs.
Don’t discount the education component of marketing. I don’t expect my clients to run out and pass a Google Search Exam after a few months or years, but nothing makes me happier than when a client understands the value of their marketing investment and starts brainstorming with our team or even wants to learn more about how web design really works.
Granted, these stories are all data-driven and lack literary flair, so human journalists still own deep reporting and analysis—for now. Narrative Sciences predicts that work written by its program will earn a Pulitzer Prize any day now, and that computers will control 90 percent of journalism in roughly 15 years. If you’re dubious about robo-journalism, check out this quiz by the New York Times to see if you can distinguish between human and robot writing.
By eating less meat and more fruit and vegetables, the world could prevent several million deaths per year by 2050, cut planet-warming emissions substantially, and save billions of dollars annually in healthcare costs and climate damage, researchers said.
“On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking [terrorist Syed] Farook’s iPhone,” federal prosecutors said in a filing Monday afternoon. “Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook’s iPhone. If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple Inc. (“Apple”) set forth in the All Writs Act Order in this case.”
How many writing projects are you working on? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about their joint writing project, individual projects, and ghost writing projects and how to keep them all going at the same time. They also ask the question, “Can you make it as a loner writer?” No!
So, join Elisabeth and Merianna for the first ever Thinking Out Loud Writers’ Conference.
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss the religion of college football, Rip and Dip vs Common Cup vs Shot Glasses, Rubio’s odd theological farewell speech, the power of professing God’s Will, and why the Republican Party enabled Trump.
“Because now you have designers, who instead of being encouraged to come up with their own, new, crazy ideas, are being encouraged to do the things that have been proven by the data to deliver results. A lot of times, in thriving marketplaces, a lot of ideas come from the bottom up. You see new consumer behaviors, and then you go, “Oh my gosh, look at what these kids are doing.” But as you end up with more predictable, controlled consumers, you end up with a less innovative society.”
Will I be able to afford groceries this month? Elisabeth and Merianna talk about the peaks and valleys of the publishing and writing world and how it’s hard to predict what each month or each day is going to look like. How exciting!
“We believe that a computer that can read and understand stories, can, if given enough example stories from a given culture, ‘reverse engineer’ the values tacitly held by the culture that produced them,” they write. “These values can be complete enough that they can align the values of an intelligent entity with humanity. In short, we hypothesise that an intelligent entity can learn what it means to be human by immersing itself in the stories it produces.”
Our stories are important. Our ability to have, interpret, and produce intuition is seemingly something very human. However, we’re finding out that’s not necessarily the case.
There’s a very subtle but very real history behind Siri (and Google Now and Amazon Echo’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana) having a female voice and persona…
“But because the creatures in these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature: about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.”
“So just what has got mathematicians spooked? Apart from 2 and 5, all prime numbers end in 1, 3, 7 or 9 – they have to, else they would be divisible by 2 or 5 – and each of the four endings is equally likely. But while searching through the primes, the pair noticed that primes ending in 1 were less likely to be followed by another prime ending in 1. That shouldn’t happen if the primes were truly random – consecutive primes shouldn’t care about their neighbour’s digits.”
Does it “really” exist in the cosmos or is it (like most things we consider to be intrinsic to the universe) a human projection based on our finite nature?
“In the old days you were either cool and a bit flakey or on it and a nerd. What we need today is cool nerds. People and agencies that can fathom the deep jumbled soup of networked technologies and surf the rich broth of culture. And help their clients to do the same. Experience design is on the frontline of this reconciliation of left and right brain for organisations. The smartphone was the catalyst, yet is only one piece in the puzzle. What is certainly true is we’re no longer looking back and instead start to shape our industry to better serve our clients and customers in this new world.”
“Each additional link places an extra load on users’ working memory because it causes people to have to remember whether they have seen the link before or it is a new link. Are the two links the same or different? Users often wonder if there is a difference that they missed. In usability studies, we often observe participants pause and ponder which they should click. The more courageous users click on both links only to be disappointed when they discover that the links lead to the same page. Repetitive links often set user up to fail.”
Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss messaging apps and the future of the web, how Acts 2 connects with presidential debates, Trump’s nativism, world religion and acts of classification, and star bellied sneetches.
“The authors of these two books demonstrate that grand ideas cannot be imposed on people without their assent. Money and power are not sufficient to improve schools. Genuine improvement happens when students, teachers, principals, parents, and the local community collaborate for the benefit of the children. But a further lesson matters even more: improving education is not sufficient to “save” all children from lives of poverty and violence. As a society, we should be ashamed that so many children are immersed in poverty and violence every day of their lives.”
“I would point to some of the recent trends in 3D scanning as potential new sites for digital colonialism, not just repatriation. Is prosecution of stolen code related to contested heritage objects a form of digital colonialism? Is keeping the code private, accessible only to the museum or scholars who obtain access a form of colonialism? Is publicly releasing the code while holding tight to the physical object reinforcing colonialism? As this episode tells us, the materiality of these cultural heritage objects holds meaning that cannot be extracted into bits and bytes.”
I was born in 1978. The C2-8P with its futuristic dual floppy drives was cutting edge tech.
My oldest child was born in 2007. This had just been released and some of the first pictures I have of her were taken with it. She will never know a world without it.
LC was born in 2010, the same year as this. It is revolutionizing how we do everything from teaching and learning to making a medical diagnosis.
And now I have a four month old son who was born the same time this went on sell. He will never know a world that doesn’t include widely available and affordable VR (or AR).
I imagine that we’ll see a similar revolution in our society in the way that iPhone has changed us since 2007 because of virtual reality devices going “mainstream.”
Similarly, things we didn’t think could change are changing rapidly.
We’re seeing our political system transform seemingly overnight. We’re teaching our children with tools such as Coursera and Khan Academy that are replacing the need for highly skilled teachers of content. Even our religious landscape looks very different than it did 10 years ago.
Churches, schools, and politicians are all clamoring to stay relevant and not show signs of aging or becoming obsolete.
However, our bodies age and decline. When we pass mirrors, we still see ourselves in our mind’s eye at the height of our physical (and maybe spiritual) beauty. The wrinkles and scars don’t always register right away. Some of us seek out surgery or vitamins or juice cleanses or yoga to delay the inevitable. Most of us want to delay death.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Things fall apart. You will die. Your church will not look the same in ten years as it does today. Your child’s school will teach math differently than you learned math. Donald Trump may become our country’s president.
You will contribute some verse, however. Even after you are long gone as a corporal being, perhaps distant family will think of you or a depiction of you in some not-yet-invented VR machine will allow a great-great-grandchild to interview you for a project.
What about our churches, our schools, and our political system? What will our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren say about them? Will they be comforting thoughts or will they react like teens in the video above reacted to Windows 95?
You are becoming obsolete. Embrace that and the decay and work for justice and peace in all that you do and with those you choose to worship, learn, or legislate with while you’re here. Worry less about the details that your obsolete brain is telling you matter.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
“The Renaissance was chockablock with copyists who learned and then duplicated Latin epigraphic scripts for various purposes. This imitation game had a great amount of influence on the Renaissance antiquities market at the time (forgeries could be bought all over Italy), but it is also revealed in the fonts we use today–particularly Roman fonts. The invention of fonts by various printers and typesetters in the 15th and 16th centuries was often inspired by lapidary inscriptions from the catacombs or pulled from manuscripts recording antique stones. After all, these inscriptions were increasingly displayed in the houses of the Roman elite, by popes, in churches, and in newly established museums.”
