One specific thing I'm excited about is the possibility of music returning to individual expression. I saved a few articles on the blog here, one about decentralizing social identity platforms and another on a music service.
I keep seeing this theme, ran across it again with this statement:
"Buy tokenizing Somnium in game assets and land Parcels, We Are Forever decoupling somnium space as a company from owning and operating database of parcels and all in-game items by giving this power to our users."
So, I did a search for 'blockchain token empowerment' and all kinds of horseshit came up, including this 2017 article that breaks it down, including how musicians can bypass record labels:
Around this same theme, I think about the value of infrastructure including physical spaces such as cities, and of course now Biden is driving a new agenda around spending on infrastructure, and how this plan may tie in with big tech agendas. Amazon and several European companies are building warehouses and moving human capital to Cartersville, GA because of the new infrastructure and low cost of living. Chattanooga, TN is drawing IT start ups for the same reason.
Search for 'Cartersville infrastructure' shows they are receiving federal funding for roads and bridges, airport, Chic-Fil-A is opening a distribution center and Amazon a logistics center.
While I've worked from home since 2005 and find it mostly efficient, it's an entirely other matter to be promoting the 'nothing will ever be the same' agenda that seeks to take away the choice of colocation based on a false narrative.
It would be tricky to take on this topic openly, but I believe it's already in the process of unraveling in a way that will ultimately backfire on those pushing it. But it's damn interesting, all the ways this has been promoted, who has led that charge, and to what end. Even more interesting, who is pushing back, how and why they do it, and how it's being received.
Posted by BeauHD from the intelligent-visual-assistance dept.
TechSee, which describes itself as an "intelligent visual assistance" company, today announced the launch of Eve Cortex, a platform that teaches itself to recognize thousands of products, models, parts, and components by ingesting only a handful of data points. VentureBeat reports:TechSee claims that by leveraging a combination of AI and synthetic data, Cortex can train itself in a matter of hours, providing end users with step-by-step visual guidance via an augmented reality (AR) overlay. TechSee was founded in 2014 by Eitan Cohen, Amir Yoffe, and Gabby Sarusi. Cohen conceptualized the idea after struggling to walk his parents through an issue they were having with their cable service. The company's cross-platform apps employ computer vision to recognize products and issues and streamline warranty registration. Customer agents can see what customers see through their smartphone cameras and visually guide them to resolutions, using either live video or photos.
Cortex builds on TechSee's existing technologies to enable enterprises to custom-build their own visual self-service flows, without coding. With Cortex, companies can design journeys for product unboxing, billing, contracting, troubleshooting, warranty claims, product registration, technical repair, and more. Cortex can walk users through the unboxing of various consumer electronics, from security cameras to thermostats, and capture information for upselling while explaining invoices by reading water, gas, and electrical meters. Insurance policyholders can use Cortex to document damage to insured property or identify items they want to insure for virtual underwriting. Moreover, Cortex can certify that an on-site field technician has made a successful repair by examining work through the technician's smartphone or tablet camera or AR glasses.
One of the ways that Cortex learns to recognize products is by ingesting a company's existing contact center knowledge base. For every device, each article describing visual symptoms and issues, both from customers and field technicians, is extracted and normalized. Then, a computer vision model is trained on synthetic visual data gathered in the lab as well as other visual resources and images supplied by customers, enabling Cortex to analyze, time, and measure the success of each step of every resolution, shortening and optimizing them over time. According to Cohen, companies including Vodafone, Telus, Orange, and Hippo have already tapped Cortex to create new customer experiences. Moreover, tens of thousands of field service technicians in the U.S. are using the platform to install fiber optic boxes.
This may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but Canon has rolled out new AI cameras that use "smile recognition" technology to ensure that only happy employees are allowed into its offices. From a report:Back in 2020, the China-based Canon subsidiary Canon Information Technology introduced an "intelligent IT solution" for corporate offices that includes 5 different functional modules, one of which is "smiley face access control. In addition, based on the corporate culture of 'moving and always being,' Canon has always advocated the concepts of 'laughing' and 'big health,' and hopes to bring happiness and health to everyone in the post-epidemic era," Canon wrote in a press release. "Therefore, in the [...] intelligent IT solution, a new experience of smile recognition is specially incorporated. It is hoped that smiles can let everyone relax and get healthy, so as to create a more pleasant working atmosphere and improve efficiency."
USA Today reports:Companies like Moderna and Pfizer's partner BioNTech, whose names are familiar from COVID-19 vaccines, are using mRNA to spur cancer patients' bodies to make vaccines that will — hopefully — prevent recurrences and treatments designed to fight off advanced tumors. If they prove effective, which won't be known for at least another year or two, they could be added to the arsenal of immune therapies designed to get the body to fight off its own tumors...
Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies around the world have been developing new ways to train the body's immune system to fight off tumors, particularly melanoma. They had learned how to remove a brake installed by tumors, unleashing the warriors of the immune system. Ten years ago, only about 5% of people with advanced melanoma survived for five years. Now, nearly half make it that long. Trials of mRNA cancer vaccines aim to boost that number even higher by adding soldiers to the fight... Once a tumor has been largely removed through surgery, a vaccine can help generate new immune soldiers known as T cells... A computer algorithm analyzes the mutations distinct to the cancer cells, looking for ones that trigger the production of T cells, said Melissa J. Moore, Moderna's chief scientific officer, of platform research. So far, she said, Moderna, working with partner Merck, has tested these personalized vaccines in about 100 patients. They aim eventually to make a personalized mRNA vaccine within about 45 days after the patient's cancer surgery, during their recovery...
Mutated cancer cells have proteins on their surface that can be targeted by an mRNA vaccine. For a tumor that has, say, five common mutations, a patient could get a combination of five of these vaccines. On Friday, BioNTech announced it was launching a new trial for this approach, testing it in 120 melanoma patients Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and the U.S. The new treatment, given in connection with an antibody from Regeneron, is aimed at four tumor-associated antigens. More than 90% of melanoma tumors contain at least one of the four. The U.S. federal government now lists 29 studies underway or that will be soon investigating mRNA cancer vaccines, according to the article.
And Dr. Stephen Hahn, who had a career as an oncologist before running the Food and Drug Administration from 2019 until early this year, "said he's more optimistic this time because of how much researchers have learned about the role the immune system plays in cancer. 'That gives us an edge to maybe finally get to the place where we need to be.'"
Posted by EditorDavid from the network-effects dept.
"Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media," reports Bloomberg:The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people's social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.
The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.
Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...
A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...
Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."
Last fall, Google's in-house incubator Area 120 introduced a new work-tracking tool called Tables, an AirTable (a San Francisco-based startup that makes cloud-based spreadsheet collaboration software and is valued at $5.77 billion) rival that allows for tracking projects more efficiently using automation. Today, Google says Tables will officially "graduate" from Area 120 to become an official Google product by joining Google Cloud, which it expects to complete in the next year. From a report:The Tables project was started by long-time Google employee, now Tables' GM Tim Gleason, who spent 10 years at the company and many more before that in the tech industry. He said he was inspired to work on Tables because he always had a difficult time tracking projects, as teams shared notes and tasks across different documents, which quickly got out of date.
[...] Another factor that prompted Tables' adoption was how quickly people could be productive, thanks in part to its ability to integrate with existing data warehouses and other services. Currently, Tables supports Office 365, Microsoft Access, Google Sheets, Slack, Salesforce, Box and Dropbox, for example. Tables was one of only a few Area 120 projects to launch with a paid business model, along with ticket seller Fundo, conversational ads platform AdLingo and Google's recently launched Orion WiFi. During its beta, an individual could use Tables for free, with support for up to 100 tables and 1,000 rows. The paid plan was supposed to cost $10 per user per month, with support for up to 1,000 tables and 10,000 rows. This plan also included support for larger attachments, more actions and advanced history, sharing, forms, automation and views.
Companies are stepping up the pressure on workers to get vaccinated -- not necessarily with mandates but with strong nudges. From a report:For months, many employers have attempted to coax workers into receiving a Covid-19 vaccine. Companies dangled cash, time off and other prizes to encourage vaccinations. Executives made personal appeals in town-hall meetings and internal memos. Now, some of those efforts are taking a more assertive and urgent tone. While most employers haven't flat-out ordered staff to get vaccinated, many are asking workers to report their vaccination status or are implementing policies that restrict the activities of unvaccinated workers.
Unlike the first wave of corporate efforts -- which focused more on getting front-line workers and essential staffers at retailers, hospitals and airlines vaccinated -- the latest push affects more professionals at banks, law firms and similar businesses. Some companies say they want reassurance that the majority of their workers are vaccinated before broadly reopening offices. Goldman Sachs last week ordered its U.S. employees to disclose in an internal portal whether they had received the vaccine. The Wall Street firm, which hasn't mandated vaccines, has told staff that fully vaccinated employees who have registered their status can work without masks in its offices. Others will still have to wear masks at all times except at their desks. Other banks, including Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, have asked employees to voluntarily register their vaccination status.
I'll begin by saying, after writing all this, I ran across this song in an article. I've heard about this band, but didnt realize it was being recognized as 'bringing back boogie'. And apparently it's coming back. I'll bet its a safe guess that funk, disco and boogie will be the next trend, so how do you get on top of it? Issue a boogie themed NFT.
It has been said that history happens in cycles - the thirty-year cycle whereby the 80s were a recycling of the 50s in many regards. At the turn of our century, I think of whether we will in some way repeat history and anticipated the return of Vaudeville. Now, at 2021, I wonder if we'll repeat roaring twenties, ending prohibition and possibly old musical forms including dance. Hopefully we won't repeat any world wars or the depression. So, maybe boogie and swing.
This article speaks about what's happening with boogie-funk today and has some examples, but it limits 'boogie' to post-disco 80s which isn't what I'm talking about. Now, this article has some better examples of women, pretty fun!
So apparently boogie is currently dead, and that was something that was emphasized by all the rock greats as standard. If you think about it, it's true, guitar rock ain't doing that at all these days, it's all this tough guy bullshit and dissonant monster voice screaming. All the greats relied on boogie, and that's what made rock popular. Because you can fucking dance to it. That's why I might cringe when I think of the old phrase 'let's boogie' when people from the 70s referred to dancing and disco, but they weren't kidding. The root of disco and funk was boogie.
So, here's the paragraph that I actually began this writing:
I've been thinking about boogie songs and started poking around. Interesting to think that if boogie woogie was originally designed by africans for dancing and peaked in the 20s, of course DLR's idea for VH was to make music you can dance to as their core, and that's perhaps the very root that Eddie was onto, that was the hot poker that lit him and Alex up. No coincidence the Frankenstrat was sourced in part by Boogie Bodies. And as you read further, you'll see how my digging eventually bleeds into rock a billie, which is of course, swing. That's the other half of VH's real sound. Sammy understood 'party' but he didn't have Dave's main ingredients - soul - which is at least, boogie woogie and swing. If you really dig into the origins of african dance, you end up with jive. Though of course, the Van Halen family was no stranger to big band, so that was the magic link.
What if WVH focused on boogie and did it his own way? What would happen? Would he need Dave? But this is what all the British bands were doing, going after blues, but Dave went with boogie instead of blues, which I suppose was the later gospel period that influenced R&B and dancing, uplifting, not depressing. Hard to categorize 'Little Dreamer' what is that? Love that song. Not really blues, what is it? A Dave original - all I can find about it here, would love to know what he was thinking.
Examples of boogie rock I think of are ice cream man and I'm the one, satch boogie, i know a little (skynard), la grange, pride and joy (srv), Rock and Roll by zepplin, and then I looked up to see other examples because I was thinking it would be a fun mash up and history.
Or what would be really funny would be to mash up an really old boogie woogie piano song with 'I'm the one' or other rock god song. They map perfectly.
Of course if you were to list all of the boogie songs by VH, there are several and those are the ones I like a lot. Watching through some songs, you could actually put Cathedral to a boogie rhythm if you speed it up. Just forget the echo. Actually, you could map Cathedral on top of Full Bug. When you start thinking about boogie rhythms and chords, a ton of famous, energetic songs come to mind.
It's like every band of the 60s and 70s, any blues or rock band plays a boogie. its not just the rhythm, its the chord structure - the song i think of from our high school guitar class with Mr. Moody was 'cornbread peas and black molasses' which is a standard blues format, just E, A, E, and some higher weird blues chord, then E again.
Then, I found an Elvis song and noticed reference to Rock a Billie, and of course, that's so obvious. Stray Cats and all the music from that genre. Bill Haley and the Comets - Rock Around the Clock. Chuck Berry! That's who so many of these guitar players idolized, I think maybe Eddie too. Johnny B Goode, Roll over Beethoven.
A great example is 'on the road again' by willie nelson. throw that one in.
The ones that come up that I recognize are a lot of southern rock. of course it comes from blues. I'm sure there are tons of famous country boogie songs we know and don't think of. Jerry Lee Lewis - then you start tracing back into the 20s when it was on piano and that's the boogie woogie which goes back to the late 1800s.
So, along with the swing, boogie we also have the strut. Again, this is music with rhythms designed to compel dancing. You can begin with ways of walking as with the strut and shuffle, walking bass, but SRV talked about letting it happen and songs that were written to describe a walking horse, the sound of a train, and going back to the roots of R&B, jive and soul, the slaves did dances to describe animal movement.
this guy does a good breakdown of swing and shuffle.
I actually thought about doing this with my dog, but I ended up making a nonsense language that I find fascinating and highly entertaining, though he probably found exasperating.
My dog: "Take me out, I need take a shit."
Me: "Boo dah jah, jezzuh muh jang?"
My dog: "Fine, I'll leave it on the floor as soon as you go to work."
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. has a solution for a potentially crippling shortage of delivery drivers: Recruit pot smokers.
The company is advising its delivery partners -- the mom and pops that operate the ubiquitous blue Amazon vans -- to prominently advertise that they don’t screen applicants for marijuana use, according to correspondence reviewed by Bloomberg and interviews with four business owners.
Doing so can boost the number of job applicants by as much as 400%, Amazon says in one message, without explaining how it came up with the statistic. Conversely, the company says, screening for marijuana cuts the prospective worker pool by up to 30%.
One delivery partner, who stopped screening applicants at Amazon’s behest, says marijuana was the prevailing reason most people failed drug tests. Now that she’s only testing for drugs like opiates and amphetamines, more drivers pass.
Other delivery companies are continuing to screen applicants, concerned about the insurance and liability implications in the many states where weed use remains illegal. They also worry that ending drug testing might prompt some drivers to toke up before going out on a route.
“If one of my drivers crashes and kills someone and tests positive for marijuana, that’s my problem, not Amazon’s,” said one, who requested anonymity to discuss the issue because Amazon discourages delivery company owners from speaking to the media.
Employers are dangling a variety of recruiting incentives amid the post-pandemic labor crunch since hiring bonuses alone no longer stand out. Target Corp. this month announced it would pay college tuition for its employees. Applebee’s offered free appetizers to applicants in its push to recruit 10,000 workers.
Amazon, which is lobbying the federal government to legalize marijuana, in June announced it would no longer screen applicants for the drug. It wasn’t long before the company began urging its delivery partners to do the same.
In a statement, an Amazon spokeswoman said marijuana testing has disproportionately affected communities of color, stalling job growth. She also said the company has zero tolerance for employees working while impaired.
“If a delivery associate is impaired at work and tests positive post-accident or due to reasonable suspicion, that person would no longer be permitted to perform services for Amazon,” she said.
Hiring and recruiting drivers was a top concern among some 100 delivery business owners gathered this week in Las Vegas to brainstorm ideas to help their companies thrive. With the busy holiday shopping season looming, they’re struggling to stand out in the tight labor market. Amazon delivery contractors are often outbid by school bus companies, where drivers can make more than $20 an hour and are home for dinner. Amazon contract drivers typically earn $17 an hour and often work late into the night to keep up with demand.
One solution is to raise their wages. But that can happen only if Amazon agrees to pay its delivery partners more for their services, which the company can be slow to do.
---
My editorial:
Considering the condition and demographic of workers, it's not surprise this is how they will handle employee retention, and likely start selling product. Amazon warehouses will soon become Amazon greenhouses, the site will become a major vendor and distributor. Our one-stop shop.
I recall reading that Amazon has been criticized for pushing employees to work in tight timelines, requiring them to pee in bottles, and I've seen them sprinting to my doorstep to deliver packages. Employees started to unionize but were somehow ultimately placated by Amazon, and did not, though I've continually read more employee rumblings about conditions.
Does anyone recall the Domino's pizza delivery guarantee of 30 minutes or less that resulted in enough fatalities to prompt a 78 million dollar lawsuit?
I've definitely noticed the music blasting from vehicles as they make their deliveries, clearly the policies are changing to placate workers, but I'm not sure I want to share the road with someone high and distracted, and under pressure such that they are pissing in bottles and sprinting to and from my door. Nor would I want them careening through my neighborhood amongst kids and foot traffic.
It's inevitable that weed will be legalized, but employers can test just like hospitals would, do we really want big rigs and forklift drivers high as the norm? Alcohol is legal but we don't (shouldn't) drive and go to work drunk. Why is it any different with weed?
Now, Amazon tells drivers that 'endorphins are your friend'. Maybe give those drivers the super human vaccine and we can move closer towards Brave New World's stratification of working class via genetic modification. Okay, Jeff, make up your mind, runner's high or weed?
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR:Amazon will no longer test most job applicants for marijuana use in the latest sign of America's changing relationship with pot. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., also says it now backs legalizing marijuana nationwide. "In the past, like many employers, we've disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use," the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. "However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we've changed course."
With the shift in policy, the only job candidates Amazon will screen for marijuana are those applying for positions regulated by the Department of Transportation -- a category that includes delivery truck drivers and operators of heavy machinery. The company says it will handle marijuana the same way it deals with alcohol -- and it will still test for all drugs and alcohol after any accidents or other incidents. Amazon is also acting on the political level, throwing its weight behind the push to legalize marijuana in the U.S. and expunge criminal records for nonviolent marijuana-related convictions.
The company says its public policy team "will be actively supporting" the MORE Act -- the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act -- a move that adds momentum to legislation that was reintroduced in Congress on Friday. The MORE Act would remove marijuana from the list of drugs in the federal Controlled Substances Act, making its status similar to alcohol and tobacco. It would also tax cannabis products, directing some of that money toward investments in communities that have been harmed by marijuana's criminalization. "We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law," Amazon said in a statement about its support for legal marijuana.
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