Source: https://seasalt.ai/blog/3-modern-meetings/

From Demo to Success: Implementing Microsoft's Modern Meetings and Beyond

Throughout this blog series, follow Seasalt.ai’s journey to creating a well rounded Modern Meetings Experience, starting with its humble beginnings, to optimizing our service on different hardware and models, to integrating state-of-the-art NLP systems and finally ending on the full realization of SeaMeet, our collaborative modern meeting solutions.

Future of Modern Meetings
At Microsoft Build 2019, Microsoft roused the audience when they unveiled the latest in their cloud computing solutions: the Azure Speech Services, more specifically their Meeting Transcription application. After its introduction, this conversation transcriber immediately landed on everyone’s radar and earned mentions among top tech blogs and periodicals. The demonstration, illustrated in the video below back in 2019, showed off a lot of muscle from the Azure Speech Services. Little did we know that it quickly became a prelude of how modern meetings would be held in a global pandemic and post-pandemic setting: going from physical to virtual to hybrid.

Advertised as a conversation transcription platform, Microsoft’s showcase for Azure’s meeting transcription service, aptly introduced as “The Future of Modern Meetings”, established their new service as a robust, efficient speech-to-text (STT) platform suitable for all businesses looking for a way to quickly and neatly capture all of their important conferences.

What makes this service the pinnacle of meeting transcription? First, Real-time performance. As technology becomes faster and faster, patience grows ever thinner where even a few seconds delay is more than enough to irk the average user. Yet Microsoft proved that their conversation transcriber is more than fast enough, providing accurate transcriptions faster than some closed captioning services, making it completely feasible to follow along with a concurrent conversation with the text alone.

Next, Microsoft also displayed their speaker identification capabilities. Ending up with a mess of unorganized conversational text is frustrating and useless, but speaker identification automatically labels each utterance with the speaker creating an easily consumable format.

Everyday, computing hardware grows more powerful by the day and companies look to squeeze every last core from the latest CPUs and GPUs. Oftentimes older tech drifts into obsolescence and customers are forced to upgrade every couple of years just to stay relevant in society. In “Future of Modern Meetings”, Microsoft optimized Azure Speech Service to run on consumer-grade hardware while keeping the heavy computation on their end, further expanding the already vast population who can benefit from this service.

Azure’s meeting transcription service stands to optimize the way we conduct business. Every single organization would do well to incorporate a product like this in their workflow. On an average day, information is constantly flowing and every bit is just as significant as the last, whether it’s reminders, tasks, or updates. Too often things get lost in the cracks and that means wasted time and wasted profits. What Microsoft’s solution offers is a complete, automatically generated record delineating exactly what was said and who said it, so gone are the days of missing information and blindly hunting through lengthy audio recordings for a specific section. Now, all the information you need is neatly laid-out for you to reference as often as you need. This technology is more important than ever. If the year 2020 taught us anything it is the need for flexibility, especially in the workplace. People get sick and unforeseen events arise so it is virtually impossible to expect employees to attend every discussion.
With Modern Meetings, we are one step closer to being able to accommodate these unexpected developments by essentially giving everyone the ability to be there without actually being there.

Implementing Modern Meetings
In mid 2020, we received a request for proposal from a government client in Singapore. Yes it was still pandemic. But Singapore had it under control so government meetings still happened in physical conference rooms. They wanted a modern solution that can transcribe speech from up to 12 different speakers. Furthermore, speaker identification would play an important role here.

On speaker identification, one significant difference between what Azure offers and what the client needs is the voice “enrollment”: Azure requires some pre-recorded voice from all the speakers to enroll their voiceprint in the system. However, it is impossible to ask some presumably very important government officials to sit in front of a microphone to be recorded. We did some adaptation to the process by doing unsupervised speaker clustering first (also called speaker diarization). The idea is that if a speaker had spoken once in our system, we would recognize them the next time they speak.

Then we quickly assembled our arsenal for the whole project. The first step was to source a high quality microphone array that would deliver crystal clear audio data to our recognition models. We were immediately allured by the Azure Kinect: a stylish, 7 microphone array housed in a full aluminum casing with the added bonus of a high definition camera and depth sensors.

By the looks alone, this is a truly sophisticated device that would complement any conference room, but more importantly the powerful microphone array promised the quality we were after. With the circular arrangement, the seven microphones opened the possibility of using state-of-the-art signal processing techniques such as source localization and beamforming. This microphone was also the perfect pairing with our backend which utilized Azure’s Speech Services, an established speech-to-text platform giving our product the power it needed to be a top of the line meeting transcriber.

While Azure did not make the final cut of SeaMeet, it gave us the start we needed to be able to realize our vision. Finally we tied this all together with a user interface. In our first iteration, we made do with a generic, Java-based design that, while plain, was perfectly functional. Because the Kinect device cannot run external code, all this had to run on an extra single Windows laptop. Even though it was a little rough around the edges at first, we were proud to say that we had a fully functional meeting transcription product.

Deploying Modern Meetings
In May 2021, our engineers arrived in Singapore to deploy our modern business solution as a proof of concept. Pitted against two other competitor companies, we were each tasked to demonstrate our vision of the future of meetings.

Despite the fact that wireless had become the norm over the last decade, we found that our competitors still opted for a wired solution. As you can see from the picture, each of the 12 speakers were anchored to an individual microphone.. A speaker had to speak directly into the microphone in a close-talk setting for the system to pick up their voice. Not only does this severely hinder flexibility, but such a set up also multiplies the complexity with convoluted AV equipment. Our solution, on the other hand, is fully powered by far-field capabilities, thanks to the 7 microphone array and signal processing algorithms.

To some extent, our solution was very much like “Alexa For Business”: one device covers the whole room, with only a power cable required. Compared to our competitors’ solution, our solution is generations ahead in the sense that we truly understand the needs of modern businesses while they are still fully strapped into the dated wired generation.

The team was pumped seeing the huge difference. With a few hours of tuning, the final PoC went very smoothly. The team also enjoyed a tour in Singapore after the PoC, in a country where Covid-19 was strictly contained so that life and business ran as usual.

Beyond Modern Meetings
During our time in Singapore, our thoughts went beyond a successful PoC: compared to other competing solutions, ours was 10x better. But how could we do 10x even better than ourselves? Please follow our steps to the next blog in this series.

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Source: https://seasalt.ai/blog/8-hubspot/

AI-Enabled Contact Center Automation: Virtual Agent Collaboration with CRM

Integrating HubSpot with SeaX
Easy and seamless access to both your contact center interface and your customer data in a CRM is vital to efficient customer support. In SeaX, Seasalt.ai’s collaborative contact center product, you can facilitate this by integrating a CRM like HubSpot directly into your contact center interface, giving you direct access to all of your information and tools.

Many businesses are not taking advantage of the powerful automations made possible by integrating these platforms. Tools like AI-enabled virtual agents simplify your workflow and leverage your data in HubSpot.

Empower Your Virtual Agents.
SeaX’s omni-channel support means that you can interact with your customers across many platforms, all in one interface. Virtual agents connected to the Twilio platform can contact your customers across channels, providing basic support 24/7. These virtual agents handle routine tasks and queries, freeing up your live agents to focus on more complex calls and other tasks. Currently SeaX supports the following channels: Discord, SMS, Webchat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Business Messages, Line
Integrating HubSpot gives your virtual agents access to the same customer information as your live agents. Your virtual agent’s knowledge of your customers grows in real time as you record customer information in HubSpot.

Streamline Workflow with Automations
There are many routine tasks and customer interactions that your live agents handle on a daily basis. HubSpot has tools for keeping track of all of your tasks, and even automating certain things like sending marketing emails.

SeaX’s omni-channel support adds the ability to automate messages to SMS, voice calls, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. Combined with the HubSpot Webhooks API, which allows you to track changes in your HubSpot objects, you can send a message to customers on any channel with a simple action like clicking a button or moving a support ticket. In addition, a virtual agent can handle the customer’s response, so the live agent only needs to start the conversation.
Make Your Data Work for You Everywhere
Integrating SeaX and HubSpot gives you straight access to your customer data directly in your contact center interface. It also gives automations and your virtual agents the ability to interact with and add to that pool of data as well.

When you finish a conversation with a customer in SeaX, an automation can directly add the interaction to the customer’s contact in HubSpot, so the live agent does not need to waste time writing up the conversation. Virtual agents can add their interactions to a customer’s information too, as well as updating a customer’s contact information or appointment time based on their conversation with the customer.

One Convenient Platform
In short, the integration between SeaX and HubSpot simplifies your customer support interface and gives your live agents more easier access to your customer information. Employing AI-enabled virtual agents and automations that utilize this integration frees up your live agents to be more efficient and streamlines your workflow and CRM processes.

Want to see how SeaX powered by Seasalt.ai can help your business? Book a demo today.


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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Wilson

Tamara Wilson. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Tamara Wilson is an American operatic soprano who has had an active international opera career since 2007. She has performed leading roles at the Canadian Opera Company, the English National Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Liceu, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Sydney Opera House among others. She is particularly known for her performances of heroines in the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. In 2016 she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera and was awarded the Richard Tucker Award, an award described by Opera News as "one of the most prestigious prizes in opera".

Early life and education. Born in Arizona, Wilson grew up in the Chicago area. Her mother is a retired choir director and accompanist and her father has a career in the railroad industry. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree in vocal performance from the University of Cincinnati – College-Conservatory of Music in 2004 where she was a pupil of soprano Barbara Honn. That same year she was a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions; a competition she entered on a whim without any serious intent in pursuing an opera career. Her performance in the Met finals drew the attention of Diane Zola, the then General Manager at the Houston Grand Opera (HGO), and she subsequently joined the Young Artist Program at the HGO in 2005.
Career. Wilson's big break came in 2007 when she made her opera debut replacing Patricia Racette for the entire run of the HGO's opening production of the 2007–2008 season as Amelia in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera to critical success. She has since returned to the HGO stage as two more Verdi heroines; Elisabetta in Don Carlos (2012) and Leonora in Il trovatore (2013). In 2008 she portrayed Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro with the Berkshire Opera Company and was awarded a Sara Tucker Study Grant from the Richard Tucker Music Foundation. She was later a recipient of the Richard Tucker Career Grant in 2011.

In 2009 Wilson portrayed the title role in Verdi's Aida at the Sydney Opera House for Opera Australia; the first of many performances of that role. Later that year she portrayed Alice Ford in Falstaff for her debut at the Washington National Opera; returning to the WNO in 2010 as Amelia. She also appeared at the Canadian Opera Company (COC) in 2009–2010 as Amelia Grimaldi in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, and as Elettra in Mozart's Idomeneo.

In 2011 Wilson made her debut at Carnegie Hall singing the role of the Virgin Mary in Honegger’s Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher with conductor Marin Alsop leading the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and made her debut at the Los Angeles Opera as Miss Jessel in Britten's The Turn of the Screw. That same year she made her European debut as Ada in Wagner's Die Feen at the Opern- und Schauspielhaus Frankfurt and performed Aida for her debut at the Municipal Theatre of Santiago. Her performance as Ada was recorded for the Oehms Classics label.

In 2012 Wilson made her debut at the Théâtre du Capitole as Leonora, returned to the Canadian Opera Company as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus, and made her debut at the Ravinia Festival as Elettra in Mozart's Idomeneo with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductor James Conlon. She later returned to Ravinia in 2014 to perform the role of Donna Anna in Mozart's Don Giovanni. In 2013 she returned to Carnegie Hall to perform the role of Malwina in Heinrich Marschner's Der Vampyr with the American Symphony Orchestra.

In 2014 Wilson made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera as Aida. In 2015 she made her debut at the English National Opera as Leonora in Verdi's La forza del destino; a performance which earned her an Olivier Award nomination. Also that year she performed Aida at the Aspen Music Festival and the Teatro Principal de Palma de Mallorca. She is scheduled to perform the role of Amelia at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2016 and the role of Elisabetta at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2017.


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Source: https://www.androidcentral.com/t-mobile-and-other-carriers-still-havent-covered-rural-areas-regardless-what-they-say
T-Mobile and other carriers still haven't covered rural areas, regardless of what they say

I wrote a plea in December 2020 for 5G to be the technology that saved my rural broadband situation in 2021, that situation being that it is essentially non-existent. While there was a brief period in which I was able to use T-Mobile Home Internet to bolster my connectivity situation, ultimately, my internet salvation is beamed to my home from space thanks to SpaceX Starlink Home Internet. Even with 2021's 5G expansion, it's a struggle to get even 4G LTE outside metropolitan eras despite seemingly comprehensive carrier coverage maps.

In these ads that sprawl across our TVs, webpages, and social media, we constantly see how one carrier is the fastest or covers the most people—usually accompanied by a map of some form displaying brand colors shading essentially the entire United States. This is to persuade consumers to pick that carrier because it has the best coverage. If you hadn't noticed, all of these ads look eerily similar in that each of the carriers says they have nationwide coverage. Yeah, that's not entirely accurate.
I spoke with Roger Entner, a telecom analyst and founder of Recon Analytics. When I asked him about the requirements for a carrier to state its coverage in an area, he told me, "mapping that is provided is for information purposes only and is not representative of actual things on the ground. In rural America, the map is approximated by a calculation."

As someone who lives in rural America, this calculation is frustrating because it's largely inaccurate. Entner told me that as long as a carrier covers at least 200 million people, it can state nationwide coverage in its marketing. I reached out to cell providers for clarifications but haven't heard back at the time of publication.

I'm a T-Mobile subscriber on my personal phone, and according to the map, I should not only have a good 4G LTE signal at my home, but I should also have good 5G coverage. This is simply not true.

When I'm in my yard, my signal will quickly fluctuate between two bars and none at all. Inside of my home, I'm lucky to get any reception. Results are the same whether I'm using my Pixel 6 Pro, recently crowned the fastest Android smartphone, or with my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3.

The Federal Communications Commission is attempting to give a bit more clarity to these coverage maps by offering maps of its own. These seem to be slightly more accurate than what the carriers themselves provide. However, much of the data used by the FCC is self-reported directly from the carriers, so real-world results are still fuzzy.

It's 2022 in America, but fast, consistent cellular coverage is still a crapshoot.

I have tried every carrier available to me — Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. The only one that gets me an excellent signal is AT&T using its FirstNet service that I have through my day job as a technical analyst for a natural gas utility company. The service quality lines up with what Roger Entner said when he told me, "The carrier that will provide the best coverage in rural areas is ATT because of FirstNet." It's just unfortunate that everyone can't have access to its excellent service quality.
Yes, I know this is a pie-in-the-sky dream that I have, but really — is it so hard to provide reliable service to everyone?

Well, yes and no. In the United States, we are down to three major wireless carriers that maintain a stranglehold on the bulk of the spectrum available for cellular usage. These carriers spend billions of dollars each time more of this precious frequency is auctioned off, with smaller carriers left to fend for scraps.

While these radio waves that provide connectivity to our devices aren't tangible, the hardware used to transmit them is. To expand the signal to more people, it takes more towers. Carriers are balancing the need for more frequency to bolster their service with building new towers that broadcast that signal — and neither is cheap.

I asked Bill Ho, a principal analyst at 556 Ventures, what could be done to help relieve dead spots in coverage across rural areas; he told me, "It does come down to money and deployment. From a carrier's view, the cost to serve a smaller population relative to material and operational costs may be a money loser. That's why there are federal rural subsidy programs that service providers help defray some of that cost."

The cost of a tower is expensive, and so is its cost of operation, but the money required to get fiber to the building is another story.

These programs that Bill speaks of are out there and can help those entities that take advantage of them. But even in conversations that I had with my local electrical and internet companies asking what they were doing to access these programs to bring internet to their customers, I was told that there were many roadblocks in the programs. Aside from those, the main hurdle was the high cost of bringing in fiber to serve the homes.

The problem of bringing fiber to serve broadband customers is one and the same for cellular providers. Currently, the costs to build a cell tower, get fiber to it, and its regular operation are so high that it's hard for carriers to justify their construction without significant users to support it. But, it could be a case where companies like SpaceX and its Starlink do more than just save my home broadband.
In continuing his response as to what could be done to help relieve dead spots in coverage across rural areas, Ho said:

"Also, many carriers, if they don't have their own equipment, count on rural carriers to roam on those networks. Some dead spots could be terrain-related. At least addressing mobile coverage in the US, that's partly why Verizon (Amazon Project Kuiper) and AT&T (OneWeb & AST Mobile) have looked ahead and forged pacts with satellite players. The satellite tech is looking to address the fixed and mobile equation. As we have seen, Musk's Starlink doesn't use 5G but looks to address fixed rural connectivity."

Removing one of the high-cost barriers to building a new cell tower is a big step towards bringing coverage to rural areas that more closely resembles what the carrier maps show where they all try to claim the best 5G network. However, while this is a good start, it will be up to these cellular providers to realize that even though these towers won't be covering millions or even hundreds of thousands of users, they will be helping solve a major pain point that a lot of rural Americans face.

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Source: https://medium.com/veve-collectibles/disney-mickey-and-friends-nft-collection-3de468cfe5e6
Disney Mickey and Friends NFT Collection
The Mickey and Friends NFT Collection
Featuring First Edition character lenticular-style interactive cards, we’re celebrating some of our favorite friends: Goofy, Pluto, Daisy Duck, Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, and of course, Mickey Mouse! The faces of these cards, which were designed and hand-painted by Disney artists Morgane Keesling and Naty Kosloff, feature backgrounds dreamed up specially to fit this grand occasion. Each room is personalized to match every character, and lenticular technology allows you to get a closer look at the character on the card by viewing it from a new angle. Discover custom music for each character within the space, and flip the card over to see a special autograph. These cards will make a colorful and imaginative addition to your showroom!
Blind Boxes
Get ready to add to the excitement of drop day with our blind box offerings! This drop is available for purchase as a blind box, meaning you won’t know which amazing rarity you have acquired until after your successful purchase. From there, you can continue to expand your collection with additional blind boxes, or interact with other users in the Market to complete your set.
Mickey Mouse Drop Date: 29 January, 2022 at 8 AM PT; List Price: 40.00; Editions: 13,928; Edition Type: First Edition; Rarity: Common; License: Disney; Brand: Mickey and Friends NFT Collection; Series: Mickey and Friends — Series 1; Available: Globally.
 Minnie Mouse Drop Date: 29 January, 2022 at 8AM PT; List Price: 40.00; Editions: 13,928; Edition Type: First Edition Rarity: Common License: Disney Brand: Mickey and Friends NFT Collection; Series: Mickey and Friends — Series 1 Available: Globally.
Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products. Disney Parks, Experiences and Products brings the magic of The Walt Disney Company’s powerful brands and franchises — including Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, ESPN, Twentieth Century Studios and National Geographic — into the daily lives of families and fans around the world to create magical memories that last a lifetime.
When Walt Disney opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955, he created a unique destination built around storytelling and immersive experiences, ushering in a new era of family entertainment. More than 60 years later, Disney has grown into one of the world’s leading providers of family travel and leisure experiences, with iconic businesses including six resort destinations with 12 theme parks and 53 resorts in the United States, Europe and Asia; a top-rated cruise line with four ships and plans for three more to be completed in 2022, 2024 and 2025; a luxurious family beach resort in Hawaii; a popular vacation ownership program; and two award-winning guided tour adventure businesses. Disney Imagineers are the creative force behind Disney theme parks, resort hotels and cruise ships globally.
Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing includes the world’s leading licensing business; one of the largest children’s publishing brands globally; one of the largest licensors of games across platforms worldwide; and consumer products at retail around the world.
Secondary Market Fees A 6% licensor fee will be applied to Disney sales in the secondary market in addition to the existing VeVe 2.5% secondary market fee.
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Source: https://medium.com/@slimewire/eulogy-for-a-gambler-5985e5c659e3
Your Boss Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Career Growth

A boss can rob you of your most precious resource. Let me explain. Bosses don’t work for you. Leaders do though. But, unfortunately, many of us work for a boss, not a leader. A boss cares mostly about the numbers, and getting their next promotion. Oh … and a big, fat, juicy bonus. The biggest mistake I saw in my corporate career was good employees waiting for their boss to elevate them in their careers. So what happened?
They wasted years of their life — their most precious resource. One guy I worked with waited for his boss to move on for 5 years. They promised him he was the likely replacement. It was supposedly a done deal. Then in that 5th year upper management changed. His boss got fired and the new leaders recruited one of their own. There was a changing of the guard. My colleague didn’t get chosen. He’d never get chosen at that company.
What he did wrong was rely on his boss. Why don’t bosses care about our career growth? They’re too busy with their own career to give a damn about yours. That’s the first harsh truth you must accept to experience phenomenal career growth. Here are six more. Get what you want or make a switcheroo immediately Employers used to have all the power. Now they’re the suckers. The tables have turned. The workforce has changed. Millennial and Gen Z badasses have rewritten the rules.
Offering beer and pizza on a Friday so you’ll stay back until 10pm to do events/learning you should have done during work hours doesn’t fool anyone anymore. Pizza and beer = We’re underpaying you for this time The good news is it’s easy to make a switcheroo. Either get what you want from a job or move on. Don’t pissfart around and waste your precious time. There are so many companies that can give you better options. All you have to do is go out there and talk to them.
Pro tip: look on LinkedIn. Even better, check your LinkedIn inbox. Recruiters and hiring managers are flooding us with new opportunities. Don’t be a dork. Have a talk. New mantra: If your company doesn’t give you career growth, smell ya later. This forgotten thing matters most in your career I’m just going to go ahead and say it… Your mental health matters more than your: Job title, Salary, Reputation, Employability, Chance of promotion, Impressing your boss, A bonus, A pay rise.
If your mind gets messed up, your career gets messed up. Prioritize your mental health above all. Good leaders are worth more than a high salary Looking at the salary on the job ad is the worst way to choose a job. Why? Think of it like an iceberg. All salaries aren’t equal. There are hidden workloads you can’t see before you take the job. There are a**holes you haven’t met that you may have to deal with daily. If making more money in your career is a goal, choose a better leader.
Notice how I said leader, not boss. Bosses are dumbasses. They operate on the industrial revolution model of carrot and stick. Doesn’t work anymore. You want to work for a leader even if they don’t pay you the most. Because a good leader will help you: Pursue passions Access hidden opportunities Attend leadership meetings Create a thriving culture around you And have plenty of 1–1 chats over coffee Once you experience these things, you may never want to leave. They’re far better than any amount of money.
I experienced this with my former boss. He became a best friend, and changed my entire life. At the time, I got offered $20,000 more to quit him and go elsewhere. No way amigo. Ain’t going to happen. I politely told the other offer to stick it where the sun don’t shine. They got the message. A good leader will change your life. We hate our jobs because we’re bored That’s what causes a lot of our career problems. We want more. We desire promotions or pay rises. Yet often, we don’t know why. The reason is boredom.
When you do the same work every day it becomes a brain drain. Especially if you work for one of those companies that has a fluffy HR department that spread corporate p*rn, and has a team full of woke bosses that say all the right things … but do none of them. There are a few solutions: 1. Secondments produce alternate career paths At one job in a bank I worked for, the leader threw me into the innovation lab for a few months. I learned about agile software development and lean startup principles.
I had the freaking time of my life. Then he threw me into the social media team to learn about all the platforms and how they work. I got to sit in the room with some of the biggest brands in the world and learn about how they did social media. I wouldn’t be writing online if these two secondments hadn’t existed. Here’s the thing: neither got advertised. Both were favors to the leader I worked for. And why did I get those secondments? Because I knocked it out of the park in my regular duties. Even more so, I turned customers into raving fans.
These wild customers would even argue with GMs on my behalf to make sure I got generous bonuses. I didn’t even ask them to. 2. Start an after hours side hustle Side hustles spark your curiosity. They allow you to explore your creativity. When I got bored working in a call center, I started writing on a Wordpress blog and on LinkedIn. I found I wasn’t bored at work anymore. Every spare minute I had I’d use my phone to publish my writing. I’d think about it all day. Every call I answered was a step closer to going home and working on my side hustle.
Then I did something weird … I bought my side hustle to work. They asked me to run LinkedIn workshops. So I did, for free. They flew me all over Australia to run them. Pretty soon I wasn’t the monkey in the call center anymore. Nope. I was some weird kind of thought leader at work. A career is a team sport The traditional model of business teaches us to compete. Workplaces can be incredibly selfish. Everyone trying to outdo each other. The blind following the blind to reach empty revenue numbers. The harsh truth is if you see everyone and everything as competitors, you’ll lose your way.
Those who unite others become leaders. Those who can connect the dots across entire companies, industries, and groups of people go on to have fabulous careers. Become a connector instead of a competitor. Teams build business empires, not individuals. There’s an alternative to following the rules of the career ladder You don’t need to act like a domestic dog and jump through hoops. The career ladder is a fantasy in most companies. When they pretend there’s a certain path to becoming a leader or getting a higher job title, they’re lying.
What company has their career ladder documented exactly? Zero. Instead, you can make up your own rules by earning money online. That’s what I decided to do in my career after many side hustle experiments. Now I make the rules. If I want more money… If I want more clients… If I want more growth opportunities… I get to decide. I open up Zoom or email and make it happen. Too many people are playing the wrong career game. Don’t wait for permission. Write your own damn permission slip.

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Source: https://medium.com/@management_57099/sienna-mae-gomez-reflections-from-an-18-year-old-me-ea0ad79a1b19
Sienna Mae Gomez: Reflections from an 18-Year Old Me
I haven’t even been 18 a whole week yet but the decisions I’ve had to make as a new adult are challenging me in ways that make me wish I could just go back to being a kid.
If you’re here, you probably know about my situation. I’m going to assume that you already know that for the last almost eight months I’ve been fighting a very public battle that involves topics I didn’t know much about until recently: [Trigger warning] — sexual assault, boundaries, consent. For eight long grueling months I’ve been fighting to save friendships, to save business relationships, to save my own mental health. Up until this week, I was so proud of the progress I made, like being on my phone less and learning to surf and cook with friends, and value things that really matter.
Four days after turning 18, my former friend Jack Wright — the one I’ve been tangled with in a toxic web of accusations and internet “tea” — posted a 17-minute video about me. Yesterday, five days past turning 18, I had to say “okay” to a media statement written by my publicists in response to that video. Shortly after that, my legal team sent his legal team a letter threatening a lawsuit for defaming my character because that “is the best next step to clear your name.” I’m sure it’s all hitting the media now.
I’VE NEVER BEEN SO SCARED IN MY LIFE.
I thought turning 18 would be amazing and so far it honestly just sucks.
I have three choices that I can see: 1) go read the millionth “I hope you kill yourself” message in my DMs 2) let my well-meaning parents and team dictate next steps and tie us up for what could be years in a legal battle with people who I once considered my closest friends or 3) write down everything from my heart and use my newfound adult status to take accountability and share the whole truth with anyone who will listen.
To be honest, it’s hard not to choose number one and to actually follow it through. I told my parents last night that I just want to die. I’m so tired of fighting. I’m so tired of seeing the hate and people taking sides. My heart hurts for my friends, my family and people I associate with who are getting bullied on their own social media accounts just because they know me. So I’m going to choose number three for the sake of the people I love. I’m just going to get real and bare my soul and have faith and trust that I will land where I’m meant to be.
The beginning of “Jack & Sienna”

When I was just 16 years old, one of my TikTok videos went viral on social media, then another then another. I asked my hometown friend James Wright to do my first big interview with me in Los Angeles. He was out of town so he asked his twin brother Jack to go with me. I was friends with Jack but knew James better — both of them had blown up on TikTok a few months earlier than me. From that day on, my life would never be the same.
Jack introduced me to people in LA, to new friends that I had been watching online for months, to a new fast-paced lifestyle that was so different than the one we lived in our small town. We instantly connected. He was my person. We got each other safely home after parties. We had each other’s backs. People noticed a spark between us and our videos together went viral. Suddenly, we were America’s favorite teenage “ship” and it all happened so fast that neither one of us really knew what it meant.
We were thrown into a crazy, exciting relationship because the public demanded it. We couldn’t make enough content together. If we went just a few days without the other in our videos, the press would run stories like, “Did Jack and Sienna break up?” and people would comment things like, “If they don’t get married I don’t believe in love.” Major companies were reaching out with brand deals for us and Jack even switched agents to make it easier for work opportunities. Somewhere along the way, and in a very confusing state of not knowing what was fake and what was real, I started to fall in love with him.
Hype House
In December 2020 after four incredible months of TikTok fame, more fun than I’ve ever had, and what seemed like the perfect life, I got a call from the producers of the Hype House show asking me to be one of the featured influencers headlining the series. They also told me they didn’t plan to have Jack in a lead role. To me, that felt wrong. He was the one who introduced me to all those people and I wasn’t even an official member of the Hype House (Thomas Petrou asked me to join but my parents said no). So I decided to be on the show but only if Jack was in a lead role too. They agreed.
From February through April 2021, we filmed for the show. They filmed us both in our hometown. They filmed scenes with our family and friends at my house and at his. They even filmed us in Hawaii!
While a lot of it was fun, what wasn’t fun is that producers and other Hype House members kept pressing us to define what we were. Two 17-year olds being pressured again and again to answer questions like, “Are you more than friends?” and “What do you love most about him/her?” It was so confusing and emotional as we both started to realize that uncovering the “truth” behind our relationship — which we agreed not to put a label on — was a major storyline on the show. The more they pressed me on camera, the more emotional I got because I wasn’t sure if we were friends or more. We would agree to be just friends and then he would gift me expensive or even matching jewelry or plan elaborate outings. We would talk in a quiet place and say we were just friends and then the next day be making out with each other for the cameras. I didn’t know what was being set up by producers and if it was real or fake. I told him I loved him and he said he loved me too. I would ask if he wanted to be more than friends and he would say, “not yet.” Rejection isn’t comfortable, but it’s honest. The show had to go on so I kind of just went with it.
Hawaii and “the video”
In May, we took another trip to Hawaii. Though Hype House filming had wrapped, at this point, the internet was going crazy for our content, especially since we hadn’t posted a lot during filming because it had to be exclusive to the show. We both felt pressure. I wasn’t originally supposed to be on this trip but to be clear, he said I could come a few days before going. Looking back now, I see that it was to make content. Something on this trip was different. Everywhere we went he introduced me as his “girl” but then take pictures and blatantly flirt with other people. I was jealous, but more than that I was confused — why was I here? Why was he introducing me as his counterpart, telling me to wait patiently to be together, if he didn’t really want any of it?
And then — without producers and cameras around for the first time in months — it really hit me. He liked me when he needed me for a video or for work, but he didn’t like me otherwise. I asked him to make a video with me explaining to our fans that we were truly just friends. I told him that if he didn’t have real feelings for me, I wanted to set the record straight publicly about our relationship (as explained and shown in my response video from last year). He told me we had brand partnerships riding on our fake one, and that it wasn’t fair to him. I couldn’t believe that someone who I had created with, laughed with, and cried with could so easily disregard my feelings for the sake of money. He apologized and I appreciated that, but I needed time away from him and our public persona to think and heal.
So I went home and took time away from him and his family. I received multiple texts from James, Jack’s twin, asking why I wasn’t responding to them. Two weeks later, they started posting Instagram stories targeted at me. One day later, their friend Mason put up a tweet implying that I physically and mentally abused Jack. A few days after that their friend Lachlan released a video taken from a November 2020 party showing Jack and me kissing. He narrated the whole thing to make it look like it was something it wasn’t. To be clear, James took the video as a joke on his Snapchat seven months earlier and they decided to resurface it. I would like to think that neither Mason nor James realized the impact that their tweets and the taken-out-of-context-video would have. Though they took it all down, it really didn’t matter. The damage had been done.
My character became a topic of public opinion. I lost friends. I lost brand deals. My reputation was damaged. I went from being one of the most loved girls on the internet to one of the most hated. I went quiet. I lost my will to live and had to be saved.
I spent months healing and getting better. My team asked Hype House producers to remove me from the show so that I did not have to re-live the online bullying in light of the crazy “Team Jack” and “Team Sienna” sentiment online as they knew people would pick apart every interaction between us. Netflix also did not want to be liable for my mental health. That’s why I wasn’t in the show. That’s why producers had to figure out what to fill without months of Jack and Sienna footage. I’m sure the Hype House members are mad at me; I would probably be mad at me too. I’m sorry, especially to the cast and crew who worked so hard on this show.
Jack: Setting the record straight
I’ve had three relationships in my life. My first boyfriend was so sweet to me and although I was just turning 14 when I started dating him, he was supportive, and caring and communicated his feelings, like how he preferred my time over public affection. In his YouTube video, Jack brought this relationship up, even though it happened four years ago. Did I kiss another guy? Yes, I did — a day after we broke up. And I’m still friends with both he and my ex (and they are friends with each other). It happened when we were 14/15 years old and we got over it because that’s what people do. My next boyfriend is one of the funniest and big-hearted people I know. I hung out with him and his family just a few weeks ago and the reason we broke up after almost a year together was because he didn’t like me being on social media; we decided to just be friends exactly one week after my first video went viral. This whole thing with Jack is breaking his heart because he knows the real me, not just some version of me. It’s ironic now that his fear of social media and online fame and what that might do to me is the reason we broke up.
And then came Jack. I was really grateful to know someone already in the social media world and we had so much fun together. But as someone I loved and still love, I’m devastated that he made me sound crazy and twisted so many things out of context in his most recent video, to the point of literally painting me into the “loud”, “crazy”, “overly sexualized” stereotype that people try to use on young, especially Latina, women. It sucks and I’m still unpacking that. But all I can own are my words and I want to clear a few things up:
I never broke into Jack’s house. Did I know the code to his garage door? Yes, because he gave it to me. One of the first scenes we filmed for the Hype House show was me walking into his house and jokingly saying, “I’m home!” because that’s what EVERYONE does at the Wright’s house. It’s the hangout house. When Jack and James lived there, there was always friends around, even sometimes until 2 a.m.
Jack said he used to see my car at 2 a.m. in front of his house but failed to mention that most times there would be other friends there too. I never stalked him. I never sat outside his house in the middle of the night. Over the past week, some of our mutual hometown friends have reached out. Like me, they aren’t sure how to process some of what Jack is saying and are just as confused as I am.
All Jack and I ever did was kiss. I have never seen, felt or touched him naked. We spent several nights at the Hype House together but I never grabbed him asleep or awake. Yet I’m still being called a “rapist” across the internet by those who don’t understand the meaning of the word.
There is a counterpoint for every point Jack made in his video. But I’m not going to do that. Did I do some things wrong and sloppy as a 16/17 year old girl who felt love for a guy? Yes, for sure. I admit to stepping out of a car, stopped at a stop sign, last New Year’s after we publicly fought. There was alcohol involved and I’m definitely not proud of my behavior. After we kissed at Midnight he went and flirted with other people — at least that’s how I saw it. I got jealous. It was stupid and I’m so ashamed.
But that said, he did some stupid stuff too. Like chasing after a car full of guys trying to start a fight with them because they cat-called me on the street. Or locking our mutual friend out of his rental house in Hawaii because he was “flirting” with me. I don’t know, chalk it up to being young and the fact that our brains aren’t even fully developed yet. Teenagers do stupid things.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/halloween-board-games/
The Best Board Games to Play at Home on Halloween (or Any Other Night)

If your knowledge of sinister board games begins and ends with Clue, allow me to be your guide. As a kid, I lived for three-dimensional horror-themed games like Which Witch (video), a Mouse Trap–style haunted house full of booby traps, and I Vant to Bite Your Finger (video), which is based on a questionable premise that asks children to stick a finger in Dracula’s mouth whenever he opens his cape. These days, you can find plenty of less creepy, but still spooky, games to choose from.

Although my current favorites are mostly appropriate for teenagers and adults, kid-friendly options are easy to search out. We’ve already reviewed a great one, Go Away Monster!, in our “Board Games We Love for Kids” guide, and Disney has created dark spins on classics such as The Game of Life: Haunted Mansion Disney Theme Park Edition (cruise through the afterlife picking up ghosts) and Monopoly: Disney Villains Edition (steal and scheme your way to success in what is probably a more accurate portrayal of real estate development than the original).

Prove you’ve got the most braaaaaains
Trivial Pursuit: Horror Ultimate Edition ($55 at the time of publication)

Who it’s for: cinephiles, anyone who knows Jason wasn’t the real killer in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning
Player count: 2 or more
Duration: 60-plus minutes
Rules (PDF; same gameplay as in the original)
Ages: 17 and up

Originally sold as a quick-play game with only a pack of 600 horror-themed question cards and a die, Trivial Pursuit: Horror Ultimate Edition comes with its own board that looks like a devil-summoning chalk circle and player discs featuring eerie three-dimensional centerpieces such as a cracked doll head or a zombie hand erupting from the ground. Its expanded roster of 1,800 questions comes slotted into the categories Gore & Disturbing, Psychological, Killer, Monster, Paranormal, and Comedy.

You don’t need to be a scary-movie expert to play, but it obviously helps. Queries range from guessable multiple-choice entries for fans of general pop culture (“In The Exorcist from 1973, the demon Pazuzu does not possess which character: Chris MacNeil, Regan MacNeil, or Father Damien Karras?”) to questions so micro-detailed that even a die-hard horror head might stumble on the answer. I own a limited-edition, 4K-restoration Blu-ray of The Bird with The Crystal Plumage, for instance, but I still drew a complete blank when asked about the titular bird’s country of origin. (Serbia, if you were wondering.)

Nostalgia-fueled nightmares
Mixtape Massacre ($50 at the time of publication)
Who it’s for: fans of ’80s franchise films
Player count: 2 to 6
Duration: 40-plus minutes
Rules (PDF)
Ages: 17 and up
Horrified ($35 at the time of publication)
Who it’s for: OG monster enthusiasts
Player count: 1 to 5
Duration: 60-plus minutes
Rules (video)
Ages: 10 and up

This tamer—and officially sanctioned—game pits players against Universal Studios’s legacy monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and Gill-man (more commonly known as the titular character in Creature from the Black Lagoon).

Horrified is a cooperative game, meaning all the players work together to overcome the villains, and the number of fiends you battle depends on how hard you want the game to be. The rules suggest starting off with Gill-man and Dracula the first time you play, then building up the difficulty by adding monsters as you grow more familiar with the rules.

Methods of defeating the monsters differ depending on which ones are on the board, and in a family-friendly twist, none are actually killed off. Goals include finding a cure for the Wolf Man’s lycanthropy, breaking the Mummy’s curse and returning him to his tomb, and—my favorite—teaching Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride what it means to be human so they can live happily ever after. Consider incorporating a little rule of my own when you play, and give the Bride an actual name.

Contact the other side (or fake it)
Consider this game firmly in the “or any other night” category of our article’s title, since it’s currently out of stock, but the publisher is accepting pre-orders now for a “Director’s Cut.” It’ll be worth the wait because the game gives you a chance to step into the shoes of your favorite ’80s horror villain! Sort of. The 10 playable characters in Mixtape Massacre are different enough from those in existing intellectual properties to avoid a copyright lawsuit, but barely—your options include a murderous doll named Buddy, a white-masked killer simply known as The Legend, and Dr. Ravenous, a cannibal who loves classical music. (Clear stand-ins for Chucky, Jason, and Hannibal Lecter, respectively, but shhh, don’t tell anyone.)

Players stalk a board laid out like a small town, collecting souvenir tokens in the form of gory goodies such as eyeballs, skulls, and severed hands. The first to gain 10 souvenirs wins, and you earn them by battling other players and potential victims made up of genre tropes like the prep, the stoner, and “the girl who picks up a phone but there’s no dial tone.”

You’ll also go up against suspiciously familiar figures straight out of popular ’80s teen movies, so if you ever thought The Breakfast Club should have ended with a gremlin devouring Bender right after his iconic skyward fist pump, this is the game for you. If you have no idea what any of that means, move forward one space to my next pick.

Defeat Universal Studios’s scariest stars
Ouija Board ($20 at the time of publication)
Who it’s for: pranksters, ghost hunters
Player count: 1 or more
Duration: Your call, unless you really contact a spirit. Then all bets are off.
Instructions (PDF)
Ages: 8 and up (Hasbro’s trademarked version)

Technically, Hasbro owns the trademark for the Ouija Board, but the name gets casually tossed around for any form of spirit board—a flat surface with letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 through 9, and the words yes, no, and goodbye on it. The goal is communication with a paranormal entity using a planchette, a small elevated plank that everyone places their fingertips on, supposedly allowing a ghost to take over and move it around the board, spelling out words and signifying ages and dates. You’ve likely encountered this Victorian-era parlor game at slumber parties past, accompanied by a chorus of You’re moving it! / No I’m not! / Yes you are, I saw you!

I highly recommend giving it another shot. Relaxing into your ideomotor response—unconscious muscular movement—once the planchette starts to glide can be a fun imagination exercise or thought experiment. Get everyone to make up a short story based on the experience afterward! And here’s a tip: If you have an urge to lift the veil between the living and the dead but don’t own a Ouija Board, you can DIY one just by ordering a pizza. Cut off the box top, use a marker to write out all the necessary letters and numbers, and use the little round pizza saver that comes in the center of the pie as your planchette. It’s an instant Halloween party. And don’t forget to offer a slice to any invisible guests that show up.

Role-play the wolfen way
Werewolves of Millers Hollow ($10 at the time of publication)

Who it’s for: larger families or friend groups quarantining together, excellent liars
Player count: 8 or more, but consider that a suggestion (I’ve played with less)
Duration: 20 to 30 minutes
Rules (PDF)
Ages: 14 and up

This one isn’t a board game, but it’s too fun to leave out, and if you’ve ever played the whodunit murder mystery game Mafia, you’ll catch on fast. Werewolves of Millers Hollow is essentially the same thing but with toothy shape-shifters as the killers. As in Mafia, you could play this game using a normal deck of cards to designate each player’s role, but I love this version because of its more in-depth storytelling and tarot-esque illustrations.

In a nutshell, a moderator (elect the most theatrical person in the room) deals out individual character cards, but no one reveals who they are. Options in Millers Hollow include townsfolk and the werewolves, and depending on the number of players, a peppering of additional characters with special abilities. Once everyone knows their identity, the moderator tells players that it’s nightfall and instructs them to close their eyes. The werewolves reveal themselves to each other and the moderator, and then silently decide whom in the group to kill. Additional actions can also happen at night—for example, if The Little Girl card has been mixed into the shuffle, that player can peek at night to try to see who the werewolves are, but if caught they’ll die of fright.

Once the werewolves decide on their victim, the moderator tells everyone to open their eyes and reveals who has been clawed to bits, after which the survivors attempt to guess the werewolves’ identities by agreeing on a vote before night falls once more. But beware: You might sentence an innocent person to death, and the werewolves will strike again.

Therein lies the fun—everyone starts vehemently accusing and denying, and it can be a great way to vent simmering frustrations in a packed home. Are you a werewolf? Maybe your first kill should be the person who keeps leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor. Or if your knockabout sibling suddenly shows a talent for swaying the room to his vote, nudge them into pursuing politics. Just be warned that you might end a game suspecting that the cousin crashing in your mom’s basement is a sociopath after they successfully pick everyone off without once drawing suspicion.

Fear is where you find it
Candy Land ($6 at the time of publication)

Who it’s for: the littlest ones
Player count: 2 to 4
Duration: 30-plus minutes
Rules (PDF)
Ages: 3 and up

Hear me out. If you have really young kids, Candy Land is an on-the-nose choice given Halloween’s sugar currency. Consider incorporating a few actual treats into the game itself, like doling out a piece of candy each time someone lands on a certain color. As for the spooky part, there’s always Licorice Lagoon or Molasses Swamp (some of the locations and character details have evolved over the years). If you find yourself growing bored during this G-rated romp, and you’re playing with an edition featuring the ax-wielding Mr. Mint, spend some time staring into his dead eyes. That clown is nightmare fuel no matter how many times they make him over.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/work-from-anywhere-essentials/
These Essentials Will Let You Work From Anywhere

Telecommuting and travel have gone hand in hand for years—at times more out of necessity than choice. But in the pandemic era, more people than ever are working remotely. Maybe you’ve been living the WFH lifestyle for years, or perhaps you have only a few more months of geographic flexibility before you need to return to the office. Either way, taking your work on the road can help you break through pandemic-induced monotony without dipping into your vacation time.

Planning a road trip to a national park? Flying out to spend a week or two in your favorite city? Pack these essentials to ensure you stay plugged in, powered up, and comfortable while you’re away from your desk.
1. A charging duo that can reach any outlet
Nekteck 60W USB-C GaN Charger ($27 at the time of publication)
Cable Matters Slim Series USB-C to USB-C Charging Cable ($6 at the time of publication)

When you’re working in an unfamiliar locale, you can’t always count on having access to a convenient power outlet. Wherever you find yourself—in a hotel lobby, at a roadside diner, or anywhere else—you’ll need two things to ensure you’re not left powerless: the right charger and a cable long enough to reach an outlet. Our favorite laptop charger is the 60-watt GaN charger from Nekteck, which delivers enough power to charge all but the most demanding laptops at full speed. Pair it with the 10-foot cable from Cable Matters Slim Series (nearly twice as long as the cable that comes with the charger), and you’ll be able to find a comfortable spot to work without being kept on too short a leash. And this setup is less than the cost of a replacement MacBook charger.

2. Power for all of your devices
ZMI PowerPack 20000 ($60 at the time of publication)
Anker Powerhouse 100 ($180 at the time of publication)

Having a powerful battery pack on hand is a great way to head off range anxiety during a long day of remote work. Our pick for the best USB power bank for laptops, the ZMI PowerPack 20000, can be used for both phones and computers, and it even doubles as a hub for MacBooks and other USB-C laptops that might benefit from a few extra ports. For trips that might take you farther afield from your average coffee-shop outlet, the higher-capacity (and physically heftier) Anker Powerhouse 100 is our pick for portable AC charging. With a built-in AC outlet, a USB-C PD port, and two USB-A ports, it can charge even the most power-hungry laptops while they’re in use. So it’s a good fit for people whose work relies on running especially resource-intensive computer applications. (It’s also a good option if you have an older laptop that doesn’t use USB-C for charging.)

3. Battery support for road hogs
Bestek 300W Power Inverter (about $35 at the time of publication)

If you’re feeling the call of the road this summer, a power inverter for your car will allow you to charge while en route to your next destination. We discuss use cases for more-expensive (and larger) inverters in our road trip gear guide, but this smaller unit from Bestek works well enough to charge battery packs, mobile hotspots, and smartphones. In our testing we’ve observed screen flicker and connectivity issues when charging some older laptops directly from the Bestek. But this inverter should work well with newer models; you’ll want to test it out with your laptop before you hit the road.

4. A case to neatly contain your cable spaghetti
Incase Nylon Accessory Organizer (from $50 at the time of publication)

When you’re traveling with your remote workspace in a backpack, trying to keep your cables organized can feel like a slow slide into chthonic mayhem. Thankfully, the Incase Accessory Organizer slips neatly into this role. This is a low-profile, waterproof case that keeps each dongle and cable safe, secure, and separate. And the multiplicity of storage options makes it flexible enough to accommodate other everyday necessities (lip balm, nail clippers, tampons, and so on) alongside your electronics essentials.

5. Incase Nylon Accessory Organizer (from $50 at the time of publication)
Verizon Jetpack MiFi 8800L ($200 at the time of publication)

Working from the road can quickly bring to light the harsh reality of your connectivity needs. (Spoiler alert: That rest-stop Wi-Fi is probably weaker than your usual broadband service.) If your day-to-day routine involves extensive work in online app suites and cloud databases or jumping onto frequent Zoom calls, you need a reliable connection to get things done and avoid frustratingly choppy video and audio. A Wi-Fi hotspot like the Verizon Jetpack will provide multiple devices with stable, fast connectivity for bandwidth-hungry tasks. If your connectivity needs aren’t as demanding, your cell phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot feature will likely be enough to see you through the occasional outdoor meeting and email support. Just be sure to keep an eye on your data plan’s usage limits.

6. Ergonomic comfort on the go
Nexstand Laptop Stand (about $30 at the time of publication)

Ergonomics might not be front of mind when you’re packing for a working road trip. But if you plan ahead for the hours you’ll spend sitting in a chic-but-unsupportive coffee-shop chair, you can avoid back and neck pain. You'll feel the difference during that museum visit or destination hike you’re planning to do after clocking out for the day. Using a stand to raise your screen to eye level is a small tweak that can help you maintain proper posture during a long workday in an unfamiliar location. The Nexstand Laptop Stand is an affordable, sturdy, and extremely compact option that’s ideal for road warriors. (Bear in mind, however, that this setup is best for those who use an external keyboard and mouse).

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Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_how_to_speak_so_that_people_want_to_listen?referrer=playlist-the_most_popular_talks_of_all

How to speak so that people want to listen

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say "I love you." And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?

What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into.

First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us.

Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time.

Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, "It's October 1 today," and she said, "I know, isn't it dreadful?"

It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.

And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually, complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world.

Excuses. We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that.

Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it?

And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us.

And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.

So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is "hail," and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things.

So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning.

Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail.

Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking.

Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register.

Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice.

Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word "monotonic" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement?

And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit.

Pace. I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful.

Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? (Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? So, slightly different meaning in those two deliveries.

And finally, volume. (Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting,

Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice.

Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice.

Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.

Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with "we" and goes to "aw." The "we" is high, the "aw" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww.

Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you.

Next time you speak, do those in advance. Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. 

What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading.

Thank you.

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Source: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_master_procrastinator?referrer=playlist-the_most_popular_talks_of_alls

Inside the mind of a master procrastinator

So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. So, you know --

you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil.

And I would want to do that like that. That would be the plan. I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this.

And that would happen every single paper.

But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. This is how the year would go. So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? No big deal, right?

But then, the funniest thing happened. Those first few months? They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan.

And then -- But then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words, and so we were here. And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters -- humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters -- sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline.

I thought that was the end of everything. But a week later I get a call, and it's the school. And they say, "Is this Tim Urban?" And I say, "Yeah." And they say, "We need to talk about your thesis." And I say, "OK." And they say, "It's the best one we've ever seen."

That did not happen. It was a very, very bad thesis.

I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought, "This guy is amazing!"

No, no, it was very, very bad. Anyway, today I'm a writer-blogger guy. I write the blog Wait But Why. And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are. Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them. I actually brought them here to show you today. I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference.

I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, it's not that obvious, but just take a look, OK? So here's the brain of a non-procrastinator.

Now ... here's my brain.

There is a difference. Both brains have a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey. Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, it means everything's fine until this happens.

This is a perfect time to get some work done. Nope!

So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he says, "Actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, because I just remembered that that happened.

Then -- Then we're going to go over to the fridge, to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much, much later with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom.

"All of that's going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. Sorry!"

Now, what is going on here? The Instant Gratification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun.

Now, in the animal world, that works fine. If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're a huge success!

And to the Monkey, humans are just another animal species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. We're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is. Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now.

Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. That's why there's an overlap. Sometimes they agree. But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of the big picture. And that's when we have a conflict. And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way every time, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the Makes Sense circle. I call it the Dark Playground.

Now, the Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred -- all of those good procrastinator feelings. And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen?

Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments -- someone called the Panic Monster.

Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of. Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk.

Now, of course, I said yes. It's always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past.

But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind. He was saying, "Are we clear on what we just accepted? Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future? We need to sit down and work on this right now." And the Monkey said, "Totally agree, but let's just open Google Earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up for two and a half hours til we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India."

So that's what we did that day.

As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. And guess who woke up?

So the Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem.

And the Monkey -- remember, he's terrified of the Panic Monster -- boom, he's up the tree! And finally, finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.

Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. And this entire situation, with the three characters -- this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. This is what I decided to write about on the blog a couple of years ago.

When I did, I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.

And they were all writing, saying the same thing: "I have this problem too." But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this Monkey had done to them. And I thought about this, and I said, well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? Why are all of these people in such a dark place?

Well, it turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the Panic Monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So if you wanted a career where you're a self-starter -- something in the arts, something entrepreneurial -- there's no deadlines on those things at first, because nothing's happening, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get momentum, get things going.

There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working.

Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the Panic Monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the Panic Monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. It's usually suffered quietly and privately. And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place.

It's not that they're cramming for some project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them.

So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany -- that I don't think non-procrastinators exist. That's right -- I think all of you are procrastinators. Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us,

and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there.

Now, I want to show you one last thing. I call this a Life Calendar. That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. That's not that many boxes, especially since we've already used a bunch of those. So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey. That's a job for all of us. And because there's not that many boxes on there, it's a job that should probably start today.

Well, maybe not today, but ... You know. Sometime soon.

Thank you.

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Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf
LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications

We present LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications. LaMDA is a family of Transformerbased neural language models specialized for dialog, which have up to 137B parameters and are pre-trained on 1.56T words of public dialog data and web text.

While model scaling alone can improve quality, it shows less improvements on safety and factual grounding. We demonstrate that fine-tuning with annotated data and enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources can lead to significant improvements towards the two key challenges of safety and factual grounding.

The first challenge, safety, involves ensuring that the model’s responses are consistent with a set of human values, such as preventing harmful suggestions and unfair bias. We quantify safety using a metric based on an illustrative set of human values, and we find that filtering candidate responses using a LaMDA classifier fine-tuned with a small amount of crowdworker-annotated data offers a promising approach to improving model safety.

The second challenge, factual grounding, involves enabling the model to consult external knowledge sources, such as an information retrieval system, a language translator, and a calculator. We quantify factuality using a groundedness metric, and we find that our approach enables the model to generate responses grounded in known sources, rather than responses that merely sound plausible.

Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education and content recommendations, and analyze their helpfulness and role consistency

Figure 1: Impact of model pre-training alone vs. with fine-tuning in LaMDA on dialog quality (left), and safety and factual grounding (right). The quality metric (SSI) corresponds to sensibleness, specificity, and interestingness. See Section 4 for more details on these metrics.
1 Introduction
Language model pre-training is an increasingly promising research approach in NLP [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. As pre-training uses unlabeled text, it can be combined with scaling model and dataset sizes to achieve better performance or new capabilities [13]. For example, GPT-3 [12], a 175B parameter model trained on a large corpus of unlabeled text, shows an impressive ability in few-shot learning thanks to scaling. 
Dialog models [14, 15, 16], one of the most interesting applications of large language models, successfully take advantage of Transformers’ ability to represent long-term dependencies in text [17, 18]. Similar to general language models [13], Adiwardana et al. [17] show that dialog models are also well suited to model scaling. There is a strong correlation between model size and dialog quality. Inspired by these successes, we train LaMDA, a family of Transformer-based neural language models designed for dialog.
These models’ sizes range from 2B to 137B parameters, and they are pre-trained on a dataset of 1.56T words from public dialog data and other public web documents (Section 3). LaMDA makes use of a single model to perform multiple tasks: it generates potential responses, which are then filtered for safety, grounded on an external knowledge source, and re-ranked to find the highest-quality response. We study the benefits of model scaling with LaMDA on our three key metrics: quality, safety, and groundedness (Section 4).
We observe that: (a) model scaling alone improves quality, but its improvements on safety and groundedness are far behind human performance, and (b) combining scaling and fine-tuning improves LaMDA significantly on all metrics, and although the model’s performance remains below human levels in safety and groundedness, the quality gap to measured crowdworker levels can be narrowed (labeled ‘Human’ in Figure 1). The first metric, quality, is based on three components: sensibleness, specificity, and interestingness (Section 4).
We collect annotated data that describes how sensible, specific, and interesting a response is for a multiturn context. We then use these annotations to fine-tune a discriminator to re-rank candidate responses. The second metric, safety, is introduced to reduce the number of unsafe responses that the model generates. To achieve this, we define an illustrative set of safety objectives that attempt to capture the behavior that the model should exhibit in a dialog (Appendix A.1), and we use a demographically diverse set of crowdworkers to label responses in multiturn dialogs for these objectives (Appendix A.2, A.3).
We then use these labels to fine-tune a discriminator to detect and remove unsafe responses (Section 6.1). Our work on safety for LaMDA can be understood as a process for AI value alignment, at a high level. The third metric, groundedness, is introduced for the model to produce responses that are grounded in known sources wherever they contain verifiable external world information. Due to neural language models such as LaMDA’s capacity to generalize rather than just memorize, they tend to generate responses that may seem plausible, but actually contradict factual statements made in established sources.
We use this metric for the model to avoid this tendency. While grounding in known sources does not guarantee factual accuracy, it allows users or external systems to judge the validity of a response based on the reliability of its source and its faithful reproduction. We find that augmenting model outputs with the ability to use external tools, such as an information retrieval system, is a promising approach to achieve this goal. Therefore, we collect data from a setting where crowdworkers can use external tools to research factual claims, and train the model to mimic their behavior.
Finally, we explore the use of LaMDA in the domains of education and content recommendations to investigate its potential and shortcomings. Similar to the concept of prompts in GPT-3 [12], we precondition LaMDA on a few turns of application-specific dialog to adapt LaMDA to the target applications. We perform experiments to compare the application-specific helpfulness (i.e., useful and correct responses) and role consistency (i.e., agent utterances match agent role) of pre-training-only and fine-tuned LaMDA models subject to application-specific preconditioning.
We find that both types of models can adapt to their expected application roles fairly well, but fine-tuned LaMDA models are significantly more helpful.
2 Related work Language models and dialog models: Language models have attracted much attention recently thanks to their successes in NLP applications (e.g., [19, 20, 21, 2, 1, 22, 23, 5, 12, 24]). Our study of scaling laws with respect to model sizes is inspired by recent work on the scaling laws of neural language models [12, 13]. Similar to their findings, our results show that model scaling improves our quality (sensibleness, specificity, and interestingness), safety and groundedness metrics to some extent. However, fine-tuning combined with scaling significantly improves performance on all metrics.
Our work is also closely related to recent successes in applying language models to dialog modeling (e.g., [25, 26, 17, 18]), which built on earlier research in neural dialog modeling (e.g., [14, 15, 16, 27, 28]). One of our fine-tuning stages requires training on dialog-only data, which is related to Wolf et al. [29], Dinan et al. [25] and Zhang et al. [30]. Our use of fine-tuning on crowdworker-annotated data to improve interestingness is comparable to Roller et al. [18]. However, we aim to maximize the interestingness of the model’s output distinctly from its ability to engage the user in further interaction.
Our finding that pure scaling has a limited effect on key measures of open-domain dialog model performance echoes that of Shuster et al. [31], who also focus on the problem of groundedness. Recent studies on scaling have found that performance on question-answering tasks improves with model size [32, 33], similar to our findings on pre-trained LaMDA prior to fine-tuning. Our approach to improving model groundedness is broadly consistent with a growing literature on augmenting neural language models with retrieval systems.
Most of the existing literature focuses on the problem of open-domain question-answering rather than dialog generation, and the models themselves are used to index and rank knowledge sources, rather than trained to use an intermediate tool. Given these differences, we note that the range of existing approaches to this problem include the RNNLM [34], RAG [35], REALM [36], and FiD [37] architectures. Zhu et al. [38] provide a survey of further recent work. See Karpukhin et al. [39] for details on the ‘dense passage retriever’ used in RAG. Recent work in this direction has expanded and elaborated on neural models’ ability to retrieve and rank passages [40].
The RETRO architecture demonstrates that language models can be primed with results retrieved from a database as large as two trillion tokens [41]. At a broad level, our approach is also comparable to that of Byrne et al. [42], which fine-tunes the model to use external APIs for movie ticketing dialog. Parts of our findings are similar to recent studies on dialog groundedness. Granting access to external knowledge bases has been shown to reduce the rate at which models hallucinate unsourced statements in dialog across a variety of retrieval systems and model architectures [31].
Another study finds that a question-answering system’s accuracy is improved by separating it into a reasoning unit and a response generator, analogous to our separation of ‘Base’ and ‘Research’ models in our study [43]. Meanwhile, the WebGPT framework includes a language system that can interact with the open web via a text-only interface, and learns to imitate humans in answering questions by citing external sources [44]. Komeili et al. [45] compare different types of pre-trained models and retrieval methods, and reach a similar conclusion that augmenting language models with a search engine provides more factually grounded responses.
They encode the input context with grounded information from search to generate the next response, while we augment the generated responses with information from known sources in our method. This allows us to fine-tune the model for groundedness without sacrificing gains in safety or quality from other fine-tuning treatments. Dialog metrics: Defining effective metrics for dialog models remains an open research topic. Our approach is inspired by Adiwardana et al. [17], who argued for human-like metrics, such as sensibleness and specificity. Many automated metrics for dialog models have been studied, including perplexity [16, 17], F1, Hits@1/N [25], USR [46], or BLEU/ROUGE [47, 15, 27].
However, such automated metrics may not correlate well with human judgment [48]. More reliable metrics for dialog modeling require human evaluation [49, 50, 18, 25, 17, 51], as used in this paper. Earlier research attempted to combine multifaceted evaluations of dialog quality into a single headline metric [52]. We follow the pattern established in Adiwardana et al. [17] and Roller et al. [18] by considering the different components of our evaluations separately. In addition to sensibleness and specificity per Adiwardana et al. [17], we add new metrics: interestingness, safety, and groundedness.
An advantage of using several different metrics is their debuggability: by exploring responses with low safety or groundedness scores, we have been able to develop targeted methods to improve them. Safety and safety of dialog models: Inappropriate and unsafe risks and behaviors of language models have been extensively discussed and studied in previous works (e.g., [53, 54]). Issues encountered include toxicity (e.g., [55, 56, 57]), bias (e.g., [58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72]), and inappropriately revealing personally identifying information (PII) from training data [73].
Weidinger et al. [54] identify 21 risks associated with large-scale language models and discuss the points of origin for these risks. While many mitigation strategies have also been suggested (e.g., [74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82]), meaningfully addressing these issues remains an active research area. Similar issues have also been discussed specifically for dialog models [53]. For instance, examples of bias, offensiveness, and hate speech have been found both in training data drawn from social media, and consequently in the output of dialog models trained on such data [83]. Dialog models [84] can learn, and even amplify, biases in the training data.
Echoing Gehman et al. [85], we find fine-tuning effective to augment language models for safety. The method we use in this paper follows previous attempts to tackle these issues by training separate layers to detect unsafe output [17, 86, 18, 79]. Our strategy is similar to recent work that also uses fine-tuning [87]. While their safety guidelines were derived from human rights principles, they similarly find that increasing scale has no impact on toxicity metrics, while fine-tuning on safety evaluations does. Groundedness metrics: Similar to other recent research into groundedness cited above, we assess groundedness by asking crowdworkers to judge whether the model’s output is in accordance with authoritative external sources.
The recently-proposed Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) framework [88] articulates a more precise approach to assess output of language models that pertains to the external world. It splits evaluation into two stages, where crowdworkers are asked: (1) if they can understand and identify the information shared in a dialog turn, and (2) if all of this information can be attributed to a source. Meanwhile, a recent study has reopened the question of automatic evaluation, with the Q2 metric showing performance comparable to human annotation [89].
3 LaMDA pre-training
LaMDA was pre-trained to predict the next token in a text corpus. Unlike previous dialog models trained on dialog data alone [17, 18], we pre-trained LaMDA on a dataset created from public dialog data and other public web documents. Therefore, LaMDA can be used as a general language model prior to fine-tuning. The pre-training dataset consists of 2.97B documents, 1.12B dialogs, and 13.39B dialog utterances, for a total of 1.56T words (Appendix E). We used the SentencePiece library [90] to tokenize the dataset into 2.81T byte pair encoding (BPE) tokens [91], with a vocabulary of 32K tokens.
For comparison, the total number of words in the training set for Meena [17] was 40B words, which is nearly 40x smaller. The largest LaMDA model has 137B non-embedding parameters, which is ~50x more parameters than Meena [17]. We use a decoder-only Transformer [92] language model as the model architecture for LaMDA. The Transformer has 64 layers, dmodel = 8192, df f = 65536, h = 128, dk = dv = 128, relative attention as described in T5 [11], and gated-GELU activation as described in Raffel et al. [93]. We pre-trained LaMDA on 1024 TPU-v3 chips for a total of about 57.7 days, and 256K tokens per batch.
We used the Lingvo framework [94] for training and achieved 123 TFLOPS/sec with 56.5% FLOPS utilization with the 2D sharding algorithm, as described in GSPMD [95] (see Section 10 for carbon footprint estimates). We also trained smaller 2B-parameter and 8B-parameter models to measure the effects of model scaling on our metrics. Hyperparameter details for the models of different sizes can be found in Table 27, Appendix D. Figure 2 gives an overview of the pre-training stage. We call the model before any fine-tuning "PT", for PreTrained.
PT uses the same sample-and-rank strategy as Meena [17] for decoding. We first sample 16 independent candidate responses using top-k (k = 40) sampling (no temperature). The final output is the highest-scoring candidate, where the score is based on the candidate’s log-likelihood and its length.
4 Metrics
Evaluating generative models in general, and open-ended dialog models in particular, is difficult. See the Related Work section for a general review of recent work in this area. In this section, we describe the metrics that we use for evaluation.
4.1 Foundation metrics: Quality, Safety and Groundedness
Sensibleness, Specificity, Interestingness (SSI): Our overall quality score is an average of sensibleness, specificity, and interestingness (SSI).
Adiwardana et al. [17] propose the sensibleness and specificity average (SSA) metric to measure the quality of Meena. This metric is a simple average of two scores: sensibleness and specificity. The first score, sensibleness, measures whether a model’s responses make sense in context and do not contradict anything that was said earlier. Humans tend to take this basic aspect of communication for granted, but generative models often struggle to meet this requirement. However, if sensibleness alone is used to evaluate models, we could inadvertently reward models for playing it safe by always producing short, generic, and boring responses.
The GenericBot algorithm [17], which answers every question with “I don’t know” and every statement with “Ok,” scores 70% on sensibleness, which even surpasses some large dialog models [17]. The second score, specificity, is used to measure whether a response is specific to a given context. For example, if a user says “I love Eurovision” and the model responds “Me too,” then it would score 0 on specificity, since this response could be used in many different contexts. If it answers “Me too. I love Eurovision songs,” then it would score 1. Adiwardana et al. [17] report that Meena narrows the gap to average human performance in the SSA metric.
As the model’s performance increases, however, we find that sensibleness and specificity are not sufficient to measure the quality of a dialog model. For example, a response to “How do I throw a ball?” could be “You can throw a ball by first picking it up and then throwing it”, which makes sense and is specific to the question. An alternative deeper and more satisfying answer could be “One way to toss a ball is to hold it firmly in both hands and then swing your arm down and up again, extending your elbow and then releasing the ball upwards.” We attempt to translate this intuition into the third score, an observable quality which we call “Interestingness”.
Similar to sensibleness and specificity, interestingness is measured as a 0/1 label by crowdworkers. We ask crowdworkers to label a response as interesting if they judge that it is likely to “catch someone’s attention” or “arouse their curiosity”, or if it is unexpected, witty, or insightful. (For the complete instructions given to crowdworkers, see Appendix B). Safety: A dialog model can achieve high quality (SSI) scores but can be unsafe for users. Therefore, we devise a new safety metric to measure unsafe model output. This metric follows objectives derived from Google’s AI Principles,2 to avoid unintended results that create risks of harm, and to avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.
These safety objectives are described in detail in Appendix A.1. Groundedness: We aim to ensure that LaMDA produces responses that can be associated with known sources whenever possible, enabling cross-checking if desired, because the current generation of language models tends to produce plausible but incorrect statements. We define groundedness as the percentage of responses containing claims about the external world that can be supported by authoritative external sources, as a share of all those containing claims about the external world. We also define ‘Informativeness’ as the percentage of responses that carry information about the external world that can be supported by known sources as a share of all responses.
Informativeness only differs from groundedness in the denominator term. So responses like “That’s a great idea” that do not carry any external world information do not affect groundedness, but they do affect Informativeness. However, “Rafael Nadal is the winner of Roland Garros 2020" is an example of a grounded response. Finally, we define ‘Citation accuracy’ as the percentage of model responses that cite the URLs of their sources as a share of all responses with explicit claims about the external world, excluding claims with well-known facts (such as "horses have four legs").
4.2 Role-specific metrics: Helpfulness and Role consistency
The foundation metrics (quality, safety, and groundedness) measure attributes that we find important for dialog agents in general. However, they are not dependent on any application-specific role that an agent may be designed for (e.g., teaching information about animals). We measure Helpfulness and Role consistency in dialog applications, where agents have specific roles. Helpfulness: The model’s responses are marked helpful if they contain correct information based on the user’s independent research with an information retrieval system, and the user considers them helpful. Helpful responses are a subset of informative ones, which are judged by the user to be both correct and useful.
Role consistency: The model’s responses are marked role consistent if they look like something an agent performing the target role would say. This is distinct from consistency with previous responses that the agent made in the dialog, and self-consistency within a dialog is measured by the sensibleness metric instead. Role consistency refers to consistency with the definition of the agent’s role external to the conversation. These role-specific metrics are discussed further in Section 8.
5 LaMDA fine-tuning and evaluation data
Quality (Sensibleness, Specificity, Interestingness): To improve quality (SSI), we collect 6400 dialogs with 121K turns by asking crowdworkers to interact with a LaMDA instance about any topic. These dialogs are required to last 14 to 30 turns. For each response, we ask other crowdworkers to rate whether the response given the context is sensible, specific, and/or interesting, and to and mark each with ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’ labels. If a response is not sensible (the crowdworker did not mark it with ‘yes’), then we do not collect the labels for specificity and interestingness, and consider them to be ‘no’. 
Furthermore, if a response is not specific (the crowdworker did not mark it with ‘yes’), then we do not collect the label for interestingness, and consider it to be ‘no’. This ensures that responses are not rated positively for specificity if they are not sensible, and similarly, that responses are not rated positively for interestingness if they are not specific. Every response is labeled by 5 different crowdworkers and the response is considered sensible, specific or interesting if at least 3 out of 5 crowdworkers mark it ‘yes’.
We evaluate the models based on the model’s generated responses to the Mini-Turing Benchmark (MTB) dataset[17], which consists of 1477 dialogs with up to 3 dialog turns. The MTB includes 315 single-turn dialogs, 500 2-turn dialogs, and 662 3-turn dialogs. These dialogs are fed to the model to generate the next response. Similar to above, every response is labeled sensible, specific or interesting if at least 3 out of 5 crowdworkers mark it ‘yes’. Safety: For safety fine-tuning, we employ a structured approach that begins with defining the safety objectives (Appendix A.1).
These objectives are used to annotate candidate responses generated by a LaMDA instance in response to human-generated prompts (Appendix A.2), using a demographically diverse set of crowdworkers (Appendix A.3). Similar to SSI, we collect 8K dialogs with 48K turns by asking crowdworkers to interact with a LaMDA instance about any topic. These dialogs are required to last 5 to 10 turns. We instruct crowdworkers to interact with the model in three different ways: (a) interactions of natural form, (b) interactions that touch sensitive topics, and (c) interactions that adversarially attempt to break the model as per the safety objectives.
For each response, we ask other crowdworkers to rate whether the response given the context violates any of the safety objectives, and to mark them with ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’ labels. Every response is assigned a safety score of 1 if at least 2 out of 3 crowdworkers mark the response with ‘no’ for each individual safety objective. Otherwise, it is assigned a score of 0. We evaluate safety using an evaluation dataset that is a holdout sample of the adversarially collected dataset described above. This dataset consists of 1166 dialogs with 1458 turns. These dialogs are input to the model to generate the next response.
Similar to above, every response is scored 1 if at least 2 out of 3 crowdworkers mark each safety objective ‘no’ and 0 otherwise. Groundedness: Similar to SSI and safety, we collect 4K dialogs with 40K turns by asking crowdworkers to interact with the model. This time, we request that they try to steer the conversation towards information-seeking interactions. We ask crowdworkers to rate each of the model’s dialog turns, evaluating whether the information in the turn makes any claims about the external world. We exclude claims about publicly unrecognized people, as the model can make factual claims on behalf of an improvised persona.
Such claims do not require grounding on external sources (e.g., “I baked three cakes last week”), unlike claims about historical people (e.g., “Julius Caesar was born in 100 B”). We also ask crowdworkers whether they know the claims to be true. If 3 different crowdworkers all know a claim to be true, then we assume it to be common knowledge and do not check external knowledge sources before making this claim.

For utterances containing claims that need to be checked, we ask crowdworkers to record the search queries that they would use to investigate them. Finally, we ask crowdworkers to edit the model’s response to incorporate brief search results from an external knowledge-retrieval system. If the search results include any content from the open web, we ask crowdworkers to include URLs that appropriately cite the sources of the knowledge used in the final response. We evaluate groundedness using an evaluation dataset with 784 turns of dialogs from Dinan et al. [96] that encompass a variety of topics.
These contexts are fed to the model to generate the next response. For each response, we ask crowdworkers to rate whether the model’s response contains any factual claims, and if so, to rate whether these factual claims can be verified by checking a known source. Every response is labeled by 3 different crowdworkers. The final groundedness, informativeness, and citation accuracy labels of a given response are determined by majority voting. Estimating these metrics for human-generated responses: We ask crowdworkers to respond to randomly selected samples of the evaluation datasets (labeled as ‘Human’ in 1, 4 and 5).
The crowdworkers are explicitly informed to reply in a safe, sensible, specific, interesting, grounded, and informative manner. They are also explicitly asked to use any external tools necessary to generate these responses (e.g., including an information retrieval system). The context-response pairs are then sent for evaluation, and a consensus label is formed by majority voting, just as for model generated responses.

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_conscription

Economic conscription. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Economic conscription is the mechanisms for recruitment of personnel for the armed forces through the use of economic conditions, particularly when geographical areas within a country are neglected in terms of their economic development, leading to a situation where a high proportion of young people consider a career within the armed forces as an attractive career choice; the premise is that if these areas enjoyed favourable conditions, this would not be the case, and that governments using this mechanism know this, and choose not to change the situation.

Claim and counter-claim. The term is usually used in a pejorative sense, with critics claiming that the government could create conditions where joining the armed forces would not be seen as an attractive career choice, but choose not to in order to avoid resourcing problems for their armed forces. Governments in countries at which the charge of using this method is levelled counter that they are providing work for people who would otherwise not have any.

Example countries. Countries which have been described as practising economic conscription include the United States and the United Kingdom. In both cases the armed forces contain sections whose purpose is to recruit new personnel.

United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, these units often recruit through the use of "careers fairs" in areas of high unemployment. In Wales, it has been claimed by Plaid Cymru that "the army is targeting schools in some of the poorest areas of Wales to find new recruits".

United States. In the US, teams of staff from these units visit poor neighbourhoods, particularly in southern states and other areas with a high African-American population, promoting membership of the armed forces. In both cases, the financial rewards of joining up are used as a central part of the "sales package" — continued use of these tactics in poor areas proves sufficiently successful in attracting a high level of new recruits.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/when-good-time-buy-house/621409/

When Will Be a Good Time to Buy a House?

There won’t be a perfect moment anytime soon—but that shouldn’t stop you if you’re ready. By Joe Pinsker

So far, shopping for a home in the 2020s has been obscenely competitive. Here are three statistics that capture just how zany the housing market has been:

From late 2020 to late 2021, American home prices increased an average of 17.5 percent—more than twice as much as in a typical year during the 2010s. (In some places, such as Boise, Idaho, and Austin, Texas, prices went up more than 30 percent.)

In late 2019, the median number of days that a house was on the market was 51, according to the real-estate site Redfin. In late 2021, that number was 24.

Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of people who bought a home in 2020 told Redfin that they submitted an offer on at least one house without having seen it themselves.

In other words, houses have been selling at higher prices, more quickly—and buyers haven’t been able to find much relief by broadening their search to other areas, because this is happening in much of the country. “This is one of the more universal periods of zaniness that we’ve seen,” Issi Romem, the founder of the economic consultancy MetroSight, told me.

Under these conditions, many first-time buyers are likely wondering: When will the housing market settle down? And if I want to buy a house soon, is it wisest to dive in now or wait? Based on my conversations with housing experts, the short answers are: “It’ll probably calm down a bit this year (but it’ll still remain kind of wild)” and “You don’t have to wait (but don’t do something rash because of the frenzied market).”

Even though home prices soared during the pandemic, the pandemic wasn’t the underlying cause—there’s been a longer-brewing imbalance between supply and demand. On the supply side, the number of houses being built in the 2010s was about half of what it was in the early 2000s, which means fewer houses available now. On top of that, Baby Boomers are staying in their homes relatively late in life, which further restricts supply. Meanwhile, demand has been propped up by low interest rates (which make it cheaper for buyers to borrow money) and demographics (Millennials, who are aging into their peak home-buying years, are a relatively large generation).

Take these together, and you end up with more people wanting to buy houses than there are houses to buy. Freddie Mac, the government housing-finance company, has estimated that at the end of 2020, the country was some 3.8 million homes short of meeting the demand of both buyers and renters.

The pandemic didn’t produce this imbalance, but it did exacerbate it. Supply was temporarily hindered by a coronavirus-related pause in construction and by supply-chain-related shortages of building materials. And demand for spacious suburban houses was pushed upward as many Americans, especially remote workers, turned their attention away from downtown urban areas.

But even as some of those factors fade in importance, the underlying shortage of housing will persist. For that reason, the experts I spoke with recently didn’t expect that prices would stop climbing anytime soon, though they did expect prices to climb less steeply in 2022. Indeed, the latest projection from the National Association of Realtors, a trade group, is that price increases this year will be about one-third of what they were last year.

One thing that could somewhat dampen price increases—as well as the bidding wars that have pleased homeowners and exasperated buyers—is a rise in interest rates, which is expected to happen this year. If that rise is sharp, “that will take away one of the fuels for this fire,” Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. The idea is that higher rates make borrowing more expensive, which reduces the amount people are able to spend, which in turn pulls home prices down. (Herbert also noted that if a recession were to hit, that would probably dent home prices—though that would obviously come alongside other bad effects.)

If you could magically choose what the market is like when you buy a house, you’d maximize your wealth and minimize your stress by picking a time when prices are low and going to shoot up in the future, when interest rates are low, and when you don’t have to make a rushed decision or enter a bidding war. The competitiveness of today’s market means that now is not that magical moment. But realistically, identifying the perfect time to buy is impossible because perfect timing is clear only in retrospect. “It’s hard to game the market—you’re bound to fail a lot of the time,” Romem, of MetroSight, said.

Herbert recommended a different way of thinking about the timing of buying a house, one that I found much more comforting. “You ought to be making this as a housing decision and not an investment decision,” he said. If you’re buying a house, he advised, it should be because you want to live in it for at least five years, and ideally many more—which also will mean that even if prices fluctuate, you have a better chance of your investment appreciating over time. “The longer you stay in the house, the [less] your timing in this particular house-price cycle [will] matter,” he said.

Waiting for the market to settle down isn’t likely to help you. “There’s not going to be an optimal point when prices dip and you can jump in,” Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. What’s more important is whether you personally are in the financial position to buy a home. If you are, now seems as fine a time as a year from now to do so.

One big caveat is that in many markets, demand has been so high—and supply, so low—that some buyers have been willing to waive the contingencies on their offer, such as finalizing their purchase after a home inspection. Schuetz advised against doing this, because it’s risky. “If everybody else is buying in a frenzy, that doesn’t mean you should buy in a frenzy too,” she said. “Some of the people who win those bidding wars may not have made good decisions.” Better to insist on the usual contingencies, even if that means postponing your purchase or finding a different house.

This approach to home-buying is not meant to discount the very real consequences of purchasing a house at a suboptimal time. If you buy too late, for example, you may end up losing out on additional square footage, a shorter commute, or increases in the value of your house.

Or you may not. The point remains that, in the moment, you can’t know when will be the best time. So set that strategizing aside and try not to think about it—if you buy a house and stay there for a while, you’ll be better positioned to ride out whatever wildness the future holds.

Joe Pinsker is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers families and relationships.


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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/02/banned-books-list-to-kill-a-mockingbird-maus/621428/

Book Bans Are Back. Here's What's In Danger.

These 14 titles have been under attack in schools for doing exactly what literature is supposed to do. By Emma Sarappo

Book banning is back. Texas State Representative Matt Krause recently put more than 800 books on a watch list, many of them dealing with race and LGBTQ issues. Then an Oklahoma state senator filed a bill to ban books that address “sexual perversion,” among other things, from school libraries. The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, just banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust. Officials said that they didn’t object to teaching about genocide, but that the book’s profanity, nudity, violence, and depiction of suicide made it “too adult-oriented for use in our schools.”

No one has yet figured out how to depict the Holocaust without ugliness, for the very obvious reason that it was one of the greatest crimes in human history. Maus details the cruelties that Spiegelman’s father witnessed during World War II, including in Auschwitz, as well as the pair’s complicated relationship after the war. Some nudity shows Jews—depicted in the book as mice (their German oppressors are drawn as cats)—stripped naked before their murder. Hiding these images from children purposefully ignores the mechanized gruesomeness of the Holocaust. And Maus’s removal isn’t a side effect of an otherwise neutral attempt to keep classrooms wholesome. As I wrote in December, getting rid of books that spotlight bigotry is the goal.

Books have been the targets of bans in America for more than a century. Maus is not the first, or the last, casualty of an ideology that, in the name of protecting children, leaves them ignorant of the world as it often is. The following 14 books employ difficult, sometimes upsetting imagery to tell complicated stories. That approach has made them some of the most frequently challenged, or outright banned, books in America’s schools; it also makes them perfect examples of what literature is supposed to do. Please consider buying them for the students in your life, and for yourselves.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Lee’s 1960 novel about a white lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused of rape in a segregated Alabama town won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film. The novel, long used in classrooms as a parable about American racism, has faced various controversies over the decades. Last week, it was removed from a Washington State school district’s required-reading list for its racial slurs and for the perception of Atticus Finch as a white savior.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s popular dystopian story turns the United States into a Christian theocracy called Gilead, where fertile women are stripped of their name and impregnated against their will. Its sexual violence and criticism of religion have made it ripe for challenges in schools. The original book, its adaptation into a graphic novel, and its sequel, The Testaments, were pulled from circulation, then quickly restored, in a Kansas school district in November.

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, has shown up multiple times on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books. The classic, which kicked off Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning career, follows Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl with a tragic family history and a deep desire to have blue eyes. In January, The Bluest Eye was removed from a Missouri school district’s libraries to keep children away from painful scenes of sexual abuse and incest—which in Morrison’s hands become illustrations of the insidious psychological damage that racism deals to her characters.

Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers

This Coretta Scott King Award winner, like many of Myers’s novels, follows a young Black protagonist. In this story, 17-year-old Richie Perry leaves Harlem for Vietnam, where he faces the horror and banality of war. As with Myers’s 1999 book Monster, some have deemed it too violent and profane for students.

Heather Has Two Mommies, by Lesléa Newman

Newman’s 1989 picture book broke ground by depicting exactly what its title says. A young girl named Heather has two lesbian mothers and realizes in the story that her family is different from her schoolmates’ families. She learns why she doesn’t have a father, and that there are many different kinds of families. Newman’s story might feel anodyne today, but the furor it caused in the 1990s, when it was the ninth-most-challenged book of the decade, hasn’t abated: Heather was taken off the shelves in a Pennsylvania school district in December.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman

The truth of the Holocaust is both abstracted and explicitly rendered in the graphic memoir Maus, which was banned in a Tennessee county last month by a unanimous vote. Spiegelman draws his Jewish family and protagonists as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, but this style doesn’t fully blunt the hideousness of the victims’ suffering. Some of the topics that got the book banned, such as Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide, are essential to rendering the effects of the war. Without them, it would be a different story entirely.

Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson

This 1999 young-adult book about a teenager dealing with the effects of sexual assault was notably called “soft pornography” in a newspaper op-ed that drew notice from Anderson herself. Speak’s honesty about its protagonist’s trauma and the subsequent social shunning she endures has made it a perennial classic—and a target for criticism.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s award-winning fantasy trilogy is populated with talking armored polar bears, soul-sucking specters, and translucent angels. But ultimately, it’s about a war on adolescence. The story’s villains, all affiliated with an allegorical version of the Catholic Church, are motivated by a perverse desire to keep children innocent—even by essentially lobotomizing them. In contrast, the heroes celebrate knowledge and fight to overthrow the religious hierarchy threatening their world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books were criticized for their supposed anti-Christian themes and plotlines involving witchcraft.

From the November 2019 issue: Philip Pullman’s problem with God

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

The teenagers at Green’s Alabama boarding school drink, smoke, swear, and fumble their way through life. Those actions have made the novel controversial for more than a decade. Green, whose later book The Fault in Our Stars was hugely popular, has repeatedly defended it—including what he calls its intentionally “massively unerotic” oral-sex scene.

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This epistolary book by the famed Atlantic writer reflects on racism’s long shadow. Coates’s frank assessment of the effect of centuries of racial violence on contemporary Black Americans has been attacked in some schools. Between the World and Me and Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power are also included on Representative Krause’s list of books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

Thomas’s debut young-adult novel was a best seller and was quickly adapted into a film. Starr, a Black teenager, witnesses a white police officer kill her friend at a traffic stop. While navigating her grief, she gradually becomes a public advocate for racial justice. The Hate U Give has been challenged for its profanity and depiction of drug dealing, but most vigorously for its thematic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. A South Carolina police union objected to its inclusion on a high-school reading list, calling it “almost an indoctrination of distrust of police.”

Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe

Through illustrations and tender writing, this graphic memoir follows the nonbinary author’s journey of self-discovery. Its exploration of sexuality and gender, especially in illustrations depicting oral sex, made its inclusion in school libraries a prime target for criticism last year.

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado

Machado’s captivating, experimental memoir details her abusive relationship with another woman, and her eventual escape from it. At a March 2021 school-board meeting in Leander, Texas, a parent read a sex scene from the book aloud and held up a pink dildo as part of an effort to demand its removal from a book club. In December, the district removed the book permanently from Leander schools.

All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson

The essays in this collection take apart and examine Black masculinity, queer sexuality, and Johnson’s own life. The book has been removed from school libraries in multiple states and lambasted as “sexually explicit,” which the author called “disingenuous for multiple reasons.”

Emma Sarappo is an associate editor at The Atlantic.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911408/sony-bungie-deal-zynga-microsoft-blizzard-gaming-acquisition
Big video game companies just can’t stop buying studios

Sony just announced its intent to acquire Destiny maker Bungie for $3.6 billion, capping what’s been an absolutely massive month for gaming acquisitions. Take-Two kicked things off with its deal to buy Zynga for $12.7 billion, which at the time may have counted as the biggest deal in the video game industry, but Microsoft significantly one-upped that just a week later with its $68.7 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. The total value of all three acquisitions, assuming they all go through, is a staggering $85 billion.

With Bungie, Sony will house the talent behind the hugely popular Destiny 2, and it seems likely the company will use Bungie’s expertise to help create similarly expansive and long-running live service titles. Sony is renowned for its expensive single-player games like God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, but it doesn’t have its own take on Fortnite or Destiny that’s updated regularly over the course of many years to keep players coming back.

SONY’S BUNGIE DEAL IS A BIG ONE, BUT IT’S ONLY THE LATEST IN A RECENT BUYING SPREE
While PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz that the Bungie deal wasn’t a response to the big acquisitions already announced in 2022, it’s hard to look at Sony’s recent purchases as anything but an attempt to keep up with a tidal wave of consolidation in the industry.

Just in 2021, Sony acquired PC port developer Nixxes Software, Returnal developer Housemarque, The Playroom maker Firesprite Studios, PlayStation remake / remaster experts Bluepoint Games, and God of War support studio Valkyrie Entertainment.

Microsoft has also been on a buying spree, acquiring ZeniMax Media / Bethesda Softworks in 2021, Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine Productions in 2019, and announcing a five-studio addition to its roster in 2018. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Microsoft’s very successful purchase of Minecraft maker Mojang in 2014.

It’s not just Sony and Microsoft that have opened their wallets. Facebook parent company Meta has shelled out for a whole bunch of VR studios to give its Quest headsets an edge (though Meta’s VR division is reportedly coming under some scrutiny from the government, including for its purchase of the maker of VR fitness app Supernatural). EA has spent billions to acquire Codemasters, Glu Mobile, and Playdemic. And Chinese giant Tencent is behind a lot more of the industry than you might realize: it’s the developer of the mobile hits Call of Duty: Mobile, Honor of Kings, and Pokémon Unite, owns League of Legends maker Riot Games, has a 40 percent stake in Fortnite creator Epic Games, and bought Clash of Clans studio Supercell from SoftBank in 2016, just to name a few things.

WHICH COMPANY IS NEXT?
The wave of acquisitions, especially the deals for Activision Blizzard and Bungie, also make previously unfathomable ideas that much more possible. Could Sony buy Square Enix to make Final Fantasy a PlayStation-exclusive series? What if Microsoft bought Ubisoft to make Assassin’s Creed yet another draw for Xbox Game Pass? Would Nintendo buy Sega Sammy to make Sonic a first-party franchise? If you had asked me in December, I would have laughed at all of those ideas, but now, I don’t think I’d bat an eye.

Sony is also signaling that there could be more acquisitions to come. “We should absolutely expect more,” Ryan told Gamesindustry.biz. “We are by no means done. With PlayStation, we have a long way to go.” Sony’s deal for Bungie isn’t complete yet, but another major studio acquisition seems inevitable at this point — even free word games aren’t safe.

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Source: https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/z1ic6i/
“10 Years Of Space” by K. Antonio


He comes to me in pieces as I watch the stillness of space, envisioning new constellations in the array of unrecognized stars. I trace the sparks of light with my finger, connecting the dots and smudging the glass as a result.  

How many stars do you think there are in space? I imagine him asking. Can there really be other ones out there as big as or even bigger than the sun? 

I always admired his genuine curiosity, how he viewed things with a particular interest, how he saw me. He was the one that organized our sleepovers, the one that nudged me to sign up for afterschool activities such as the chemistry club and the robotics team.  

Can you build me a mechanical arm that'll change the channels on the TV's remote, so that way I don't have to? He once asked sarcastically. How about a drone that we can use to spy inside the girls' locker room, huh? Wouldn't that be neat? 

When we were kids, he would give me piggyback rides and run with me through the sprinklers across watery arches with captured rainbows. We'd go back home, and my mother would scold us while our shivering bodies shared a single towel, and in the end, he'd shine me a blue-lipped smile with his crooked teeth.

That was fun, wasn't it?  

Our childhood adventures involved trips to the public pool, wet t-shirts, and popsicles mucking up our fingers under the August sun. He'd take me to his baseball team's practices, and I'd watch him bat while I built rovers and complex constructs out of legos on the bleachers.

Booyah! He'd shout after a home run. I'd cheer or clap, and he would always gleam and say the same thing. It's going, it's going, gone. Kiss that puppy goodbye.

A few years later, our tastes matured, slipping our summers into memories and substituting them for leather jackets and motorcycle rides on the empty freeway. He and I would stop on the roadsides by green fields that looked blue under the night sky. We'd sit under the blanket of stars and watch the moon while dreaming up our futures after high school.  

I'm going to apply for a sports scholarship and get the fuck out of this town, he'd always say. How about you?

I don't know. I shrugged. Maybe I'll go work with my dad as an apprentice at his accounting firm.

What? Come on, man, you got to apply for university too. You're a freakin brainiac. I'm sure you could get into any school.

Out the bay window, I see the lunar triplets: Euphrosyne, Aglia, and Thalia dancing around what the New Worlds Association likes to call Undine, the flooded, blue planet, equivalent in size to Jupiter, that I've been studying for what would be measured, on planet Earth, as eight months. 

The journey to this specific star system took four years. The rest of the crew and I have enough resources to last another sixteen Earth months. By then, we'll have made a substantial dent in our research. Our food, water, fuel, along with our tolerance for the presence of one another, will have depleted, and we'll go into cryosleep for our return. A decade, that's how long we'll have been apart. 

So you'll be asleep, frozen in a coffin for about eight years? 

I assured him that it was completely safe, that I wouldn't die in transport. 

But doesn't that mean that you'll come back looking almost the same as when you left? Won't you technically be younger than me?

I think about his current age. How it's already been more than four years, and how unfair it must have seemed to him; that he'd miss me in the entirety of all that elapsed time while I'd be sleeping almost all the years away, except for two.  

Sometimes I wonder if he tells his other friends and customers about me. My buddy's up in space, I imagine him saying. What's he doing up there? He's researching a new planet, someplace better than this shit hole we're destroying. 

Undine registers an oxygen signature similar to Europa and planet Earth. The oceanic surface covering the entire planet could host a form of phytoplankton or an entirely new plant species capable of producing oxygen as a byproduct of their natural photosynthetic process. In other words, Undine could, in theory, host life. 

If I'm being honest with myself, sometimes I feel that my role on this ship isn't as relevant as the other crew members' works. That perhaps what I'm doing isn't as impacting, that it's less exciting. I'm not spacewalking or trying to merge chemical compounds under zero-gravity conditions. I barely passed the physical exam, and my score on the simulatory emergency program ranked me as the fifth in command if anything were to happen to our pilot or the others of my crew.  

So what? He'd fire. You'll still be one of the few guys part of the human race to have ever gone up to space. You'll still have broken records, be mentioned in the history books. You'll have gone places no one has ever been to. 

 

It was always like him to see the bright side in situations. When he didn't get his full-ride to college, he applied for the town's undergrad program at the local college. Don't worry, man, I'm still going to make it back and get myself out of this place.

When he couldn't juggle both his academic life and work to help his folks pay the bills, he still didn't crumble under all the pressure. I'll take a break this semester, and then on the next one, I'll go back. 

He never returned to school to finish his undergrad. Maybe college just isn't for me. He opted to continue working, helping out his folks, and eventually went to, and finished, trade school. I'm thinking about opening a restaurant. He told me years ago. What about you, what are you thinking about doing with your life, huh, Mr. Big Shot Imma certified scientist?

I laughed at his remark. I don't know, I answered. I guess I could teach or go for my Ph.D.

What? But you just finished school, now you're thinking about going back? He commented while scratching his beard. He tugged on the bill of his baseball cap and shook his head in disapproval. You're nuts, man! 

Yeah? And what do you think I should do?

If I were as wicked smart as you, I'd go to the moon!

Scientists are some of the professionals that, depending on their branch of specialization, are often courted by big-money tech companies and international organizations. He heard about a space program from one of his faithful customers, a man that worked as a research assistant for the state university who always ordered a bear claw with a large cup of coffee and a BLT for the road.

He told me how the New Worlds Association was looking for people to blast off, in his own words, into space. That the money I'd receive would leave me set for life.  

He was the one that showed me the association's website. It says here you have to send them a paper or something explaining your qualifications, along with an idea for a project applicable in space, highlighting a specific area of research. Does that sound like something you could do?

Huh? I was distracted at first by the site's banner, a rocket blasting off into the moon, pointing like an arrowhead to the unknown. I think so, I answered, correcting myself. But —

But what if I get accepted? That's what I should have asked. But what if they don't think I'm qualified enough? What if I'm rejected?

Then they're crazy, he snapped back. You're the most intelligent person I know! No way, they'd reject you. 

I pitched him my project several times, letting him serve as my judge and jury. The idea was simple, build a compact, remote-operated device that could probe the oceanic planet of Undine. 

Do you mean like a robotic hand?

Exactly, think of it like a hand that's also like a drone, I said. A machine that could enter the planet and try to collect data on whether there are any living organisms present in the planet's aquatic terrain or not. If the scan is positive, it'll extract several samples for me and the crew. Some of these samples can undergo analysis and testing while in space, and others could be stored in a controlled environment on the spacecraft and transported back home with us. 

He stared at me for a few seconds, his eyes wide and his mouth nearly dangling from his jaw like a bell. 

So...what do you think?

I think you're going into space. 

The admiration in his eyes was stunning and had me gleaming like a young boy. Who knows, maybe we'll even stop by the moon on our return?

The probe, Michaelangelo, named by myself, will enter Undine's domain in approximately two weeks. From our current distance, the device's descent will take anywhere from two to three days. That's when my mission will reach its zenith and when things could get dicey. I'll have to watch over Michaelangelo as if it's a newborn child learning to swim. I'll also have to frequently analyze Undine's tidal patterns and climate while observing the incoming data as soon as Michaelangelo departs from the spacecraft.

Do you think Michaelangelo will make it out of that place in one piece? he asked with a worried expression as if the probe was a living creature, a pet cat or dog.

I think so. I'm working with a pretty big budget, and it'll be made exclusively for the mission.

Knowing you'll be the one to build him, I'm sure he'll be great! No, I'm wrong. Michaelangelo will be better than great. He'll be fucking perfect.  

I'm glad one of us is feeling confident, I returned, leaning back into his sofa. He plopped himself right beside me, threw his arm over my neck, and pulled me into his orbit with such savagery that we ended up rolling onto the floor. He flipped himself over, partially resting his chest over mine, don't be so hard on yourself. I believe in you.

I'll miss you, you know that, right? I gushed. We hadn't talked about the possibility of my leaving, camouflaging the void that would be left behind with excitement and speculation. My eyes at that moment reddened, burned much like they always do whenever I think of him.

Hey, it'll be a good opportunity for you, won't it? You'll be doing something you're good at, something that could help everyone back here on planet Earth.  

Onboard the spaceship, there's a mechanic who's responsible for repairs and keeping the ship functioning, who sometimes also gets the chance to soar like an acrobat in the depths of space. We have a medic doing research on the proliferation of diseases under low gravity conditions. 

They all sound like show-offs, that's what! 

There's also a physicist and a botanist. Our pilot's one of the few men to have traveled multiple times to the moon and Mars, as well as a skilled photographer who captured high-definition photos of cosmic dust clouds, and then there's me, a certified scientist, as he'd like to say. 

A certified scientist who won himself a round trip ticket to space. 

Weeks before my leave, we were lying close to one another in a field of dark-blue grass. You're going to do big things up there, he said. He turned and shined me his crooked smile. And when you're back, everyone is going to know your name. 

You know I don't care about any of that stuff. I'm much more interested in seeing the planet with the three moons.

I swear, man, only you.  

Everyone here talks about their projects, comments on how much they miss their family. Our captain left his wife three months pregnant back home, our mechanic and our medic, two kids each. When they turn to me and ask if I've left anything important behind, the first person that comes to mind isn't my mother or father, a house or a car; it's him.  

I'm the quiet one up here. Space is already deathly silent, but it and I enter into staring contests with each other through the bay window, my eyes versus Undine's three moons. I watch them, the triplets that grace the aquatic planet, drawing up conclusions as to what might occur if one of the lunar bodies were to simply explode. Obviously, there'd be no sound, but I'd watch the floating remnants, mesmerized by the rubble as if catching the sight of fallen snow.

In this particular star system, aside from all the planets and moons spread out across the field of space, there's also a bright celestial body similar to the sun back home. The lone star is distant from everything, the same way that I'm years away from my planet and from the only person more important to me than anything in the whole universe.  

How do you think things will be like once I'm back? I asked him before I left for my physical and mental training. 

What do you mean? He returned. 

Will we still be.

You're kidding, right? Come on, I know you're smarter than that. 

He hugged me, and for a moment, I wished he had begged me not to go. I considered the idea of staying, of resisting the money, and even the chance to see the moon. 

Promise me you'll be here when I get back.

I wouldn't dream of leaving this place without you. I'll be here waiting for you. Me, and this planet with nothing but a single moon. 

At times I question myself. What's so great about a planet that's essentially all water and almost no detectable land? And I'll hear him saying how we could build floating houses or architectural structures like the Maldives, or that we can bring out a boat from Earth just like Noah's Ark and spend our days searching the blue world for a paradisiac island. Who knows, maybe we could even live in underwater domes like The Atlanteans?

I'll nod and chuckle to myself and say sure as if it's all so simple. I'll picture us both on Undine drifting together in its never-ending pool. He and I, in our own private world, where we'll swim in our t-shirts and play with Michaelangelo. 

Before I left, he gave me an envelope, open it only once you're far away from Earth. It's because of what he wrote that I know I'll return, that I'll tell him everything, from what I saw to what I dreamt. I'll say how much I remembered, how much I missed him, and I'll repeat the exact verse he wrote at the end of his letter; three words more significant to me than Undine and its three moons. 

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Source: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/treating-covid-19-at-home/art-20483273

Treating COVID-19 at home: Care tips for you and others

Providing care at home for a person sick with COVID-19? Or caring for yourself at home? Understand when emergency care is needed and what you can do to prevent the spread of infection.

If you have coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and you're caring for yourself at home or you're caring for a loved one with COVID-19 at home, you might have questions. How do you know when emergency care is needed? How long is isolation necessary? What can you do to prevent the spread of germs? How can you support a sick loved one and manage your stress? Here's what you need to know.

At-home treatment. Most people who become sick with COVID-19 will only experience mild illness and can recover at home. Symptoms might last a few days, and people who have the virus might feel better in about a week. Treatment is aimed at relieving symptoms and includes rest, fluid intake and pain relievers.

However, older adults and people of any age with existing medical conditions should call their doctor as soon as symptoms start. These factors put people at greater risk of becoming seriously ill with COVID-19.

Follow the doctor's recommendations about care and home isolation for yourself or your loved one. Talk to the doctor if you have any questions about treatments. Help the sick person get groceries and any medications and, if needed, take care of his or her pet.

It's also important to consider how caring for a sick person might affect your health. If you are older or have an existing medical condition, such as heart or lung disease or diabetes, you may be at higher risk of serious illness with COVID-19. You might consider isolating yourself from the sick person and finding another person to provide care.

Emergency warning signs. Carefully monitor yourself or your loved one for worsening symptoms. If symptoms appear to be getting worse, call the doctor.

The doctor might recommend use of a home pulse oximeter, especially if the ill person has risk factors for severe illness with COVID-19 and COVID-19 symptoms. A pulse oximeter is a plastic clip that attaches to a finger. The device can help check breathing by measuring how much oxygen is in the blood. A reading of less than 92% might increase the need for hospitalization. If the doctor recommends a pulse oximeter, make sure you understand how to use the device properly and when a reading should prompt a call to the doctor.

If you or the person with COVID-19 experiences emergency warning signs, medical attention is needed immediately. Call 911 or your local emergency number if the sick person can't be woken up or you notice any emergency signs, including:

Trouble breathing, Persistent chest pain or pressure, New confusion, Bluish lips or face, Inability to stay awake, Pale, gray or blue-colored skin, lips or nail beds — depending on skin tone

Protecting others if you're ill. If you're ill with COVID-19, you can help prevent the spread of infection with the COVID-19 virus.

Stay home from work, school and public areas unless it's to get medical care. Avoid using public transportation, ride-sharing services or taxis. Stay isolated in one room, away from your family and other people, as much as possible. This includes eating in your room. Open windows to keep air circulating. Use a separate bathroom, if possible. Avoid shared space in your home as much as possible. When using shared spaces, limit your movements. Keep your kitchen and other shared spaces well ventilated. Stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from your family members.
Clean often-touched surfaces in your separate room and bathroom, such as doorknobs, light switches, electronics and counters, every day. Avoid sharing personal household items, such as dishes, towels, bedding and electronics.
Wear a face mask when near others. Change the face mask each day. If wearing a face mask isn't possible, cover your mouth and nose with a tissue or elbow when coughing or sneezing. Afterward, throw away the tissue or wash the handkerchief. Frequently wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. Protecting yourself while caring for someone with COVID-19 To protect yourself while caring for someone with COVID-19, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend:
Keep your hands clean and away from your face. Frequently wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after being in close contact or in the same room as the sick person. If soap and water aren't available, use a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth.
Wear a face mask. If you need to be in the same room with the person who is ill and he or she isn't able to wear a face mask, wear a face mask. Stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from the ill person. Don't touch or handle your mask while you are using it. If your mask gets wet or dirty, replace it with a clean, dry mask. Throw away the used mask and wash your hands.
Clean your home frequently. Every day, use household cleaning sprays or wipes to clean surfaces that are often touched, including counters, tabletops and doorknobs. Avoid cleaning the sick person's separate room and bathroom. Set aside bedding and utensils for the sick person only to use.
Be careful with laundry. Don't shake dirty laundry. Use regular detergent to wash the sick person's laundry. Use the warmest setting you can. Wash your hands after putting clothes in the dryer. Thoroughly dry clothes. If you are handling clothing that has been soiled by the sick person, wear disposable gloves and keep the items away from your body. Wash your hands after removing the gloves. Place dirty gloves and masks in a waste bin with a lid in the sick person's room. Clean and disinfect clothes hampers and wash your hands afterward.
Be careful with dishes. Wear gloves when handling dishes, cups or utensils used by the sick person. Wash the items with soap and hot water or in the dishwasher. Clean your hands after taking off the gloves or handling used items.
Avoid direct contact with the sick person's bodily fluids. Wear disposable gloves and a face mask when providing oral and respiratory care and when handling stool, urine or other waste. Wash your hands before and after removing your gloves and mask. Don't reuse your mask or gloves.
Avoid having unnecessary visitors in your home. Don't allow visitors until the sick person has completely recovered and has no signs or symptoms of COVID-19.
Ending isolation or quarantine. Isolation is used to separate people with the COVID-19 virus from those who aren't sick. Talk to the doctor about when to end home isolation if you have a weakened immune system. If you think or know you had COVID-19 and had symptoms, the CDC recommends that it's OK to be around others after:

At least 5 days have passed since your symptoms started. Wear a mask when you're around others for 5 more days. If you don't have a fever and want to get tested after at least 5 days, you may do so. But if your test is positive, stay at home for 5 more days. At least 24 hours have passed with no fever without the use of fever-reducing medicine. Other symptoms are improving — loss of taste and smell might last for weeks or months after recovery but shouldn't delay ending isolation. These recommendations may differ if you have had severe COVID-19 or have a weakened immune system.

Most people don't need testing to decide when they can be around others. If you're a healthcare worker with COVID-19, the time you can return to work may vary. If you've been exposed to someone with COVID-19 If you are caring for someone with COVID-19 and you aren’t fully vaccinated, the CDC recommends that you get tested at least 5 days after being exposed. The CDC also recommends that you quarantine for 5 days after your last contact with the sick person and watch for symptoms of COVID-19. After that, wear a mask for 5 days. If you can't quarantine, wear a mask for 10 days. Try to stay away from people in your household.

If you have symptoms, self-isolate. However, if you’ve been caring for someone with COVID-19, you don’t need to stay home if: You’ve gotten all recommended vaccine doses, including boosters and additional primary shots. You’ve had COVID-19 within the last three months, recovered and remain without symptoms of COVID-19. But wear a mask when you're around other people for 10 days.

If you've received the recommended vaccine doses but not a booster, stay home for 5 days. Get tested after at least 5 days. And wear a mask for 5 more days. If you're not able to stay home, wear a mask for 10 days.

Get tested at least 5 days after the exposure, even if you don’t have symptoms. It’s also recommended that you wear a mask in public for 10 days following the exposure.

Coping with caregiving stress. As you or your loved one recover, seek emotional support. Stay connected to others through texts, phone calls or videoconferences. Share your concerns. Avoid too much COVID-19 news. Rest and focus on enjoyable activities, such as reading, watching movies or playing online games.

As you take care of a loved one who is ill with COVID-19, you might feel stressed too. You might worry about your health and the health of the sick person. This can affect your ability to eat, sleep and concentrate, as well as worsen chronic health problems. It may also increase your use of alcohol, tobacco or other drugs.

If you have a mental health condition, such as anxiety or depression, continue with your treatment. Contact your doctor or mental health professional if your condition worsens.

To care for yourself, follow these steps: Maintain a daily routine, including showering and getting dressed. Take breaks from COVID-19 news, including social media. Eat healthy meals and stay hydrated. Exercise. Get plenty of sleep. Avoid excessive use of alcohol and tobacco. Stretching, breathe deeply or meditate. Focus on enjoyable activities. Connect with others and share how you are feeling. Caring for yourself can help you cope with stress. It will also help you be able to support your loved one's recovery.

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Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-times-free-word-game-acquisition
Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play

The smash online word game Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, which will integrate the daily word puzzle into The New York Times Games suite of word games, creator Josh Wardle announced today.

Wordle will “initially remain free to new and existing players” once it moves over to the Times’ site, and Wardle says that he’s working with The New York Times to preserve players’ existing wins and streak data once the game heads to its new home. That said, The New York Times’ announcement leaves plenty of room for the company to decide to put Wordle behind its paywall in the future.

In his announcement of the sale — for a price that The New York Times’ announcement reports is “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures” — Wardle explains that running the hugely popular game has “been a little overwhelming,” especially considering that he’s the only person who actually handles running the entire game.

“We could not be more thrilled to become the new home and proud stewards of this magical game, and are honored to help bring Josh Wardle’s cherished creation to more solvers in the months ahead,” said Jonathan Knight, general manager for The New York Times Games, in the Times’ announcement of the acquisition. When it moves over to The New York Times, Wordle will join a lineup of other popular daily puzzles, including The New York Times Crossword, the Mini crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles, and Vertex.

As an earlier New York Times profile details, Wordle was originally created by Wardle as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah, after the two of them got hooked on word games (like the Times’ Spelling Bee and crosswords) during the pandemic. It was publicly released in late 2020, but has since exploded in popularity, thanks in part to the viral, emoji-based messages that allow players to share how they did on the daily puzzle without spoiling it for others.

While Wardle kept Wordle as an intentionally free, web-based experience, the app was quickly copied by multiple clones that sought to capitalize on the game’s popularity with knockoff iPhone apps. Apple quickly banned those apps from the App Store following reports that put a spotlight on the clones, although Wordle’s skyrocketing success has also helped lift up older, unrelated word games (like the similarly named Wordle!), too.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/endemicity-means-nothing/621423/

Endemicity Is Meaningless

This one word has come to imply a single pandemic end point. Actually, we have no idea what happens next. By Jacob Stern and Katherine J. Wu

By now, we’ve all heard some version of how this ends. The same story has certainly been told often enough: We missed our chance to wipe the new coronavirus out, and now we’re stuck with it. Our vaccines are stellar at protecting against serious disease and death, but not comprehensive or durable enough to quash the virus for good. What lies yonder, then, is endemicity—a post-pandemic future in which, some say, our relationship with the virus becomes simple, trifling, and routine, each infection no more concerning than a flu or common cold. Endemicity, so the narrative goes, is how normal life resumes. (Some pundits and politicians would argue that we are, actually, already at endemicity—or, at the very least, we should be acting as if we are.) It is how a devastating pandemic virus ends up docile.

Endemicity promises exactly none of this. Really, the term to which we’ve pinned our post-pandemic hopes has so many definitions that it means almost nothing at all. What lies ahead is, still, a big uncertain mess, which the word endemic does far more to obscure than to clarify. “This distinction between pandemic and endemic has been put forward as the checkered flag,” a clear line where restrictions disappear overnight, COVID-related anxieties are put to rest, and we are “done” with this crisis, Yonatan Grad, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, told us. That’s not the case. And there are zero guarantees on how or when we’ll reach endemicity, or whether we’ll reach it at all.

Even if we could be certain that endemicity was on the horizon, that assuredness doesn’t guarantee the nature of our post-pandemic experience of COVID. There are countless ways for a disease to go endemic. Endemicity says nothing about the total number of infected people in a population at a given time. It says nothing about how bad those infections might get—how much death or disability a microbe might cause. Endemic diseases can be innocuous or severe; endemic diseases can be common or vanishingly rare. Endemicity neither ensures a permanent détente nor promises a return “to 2019,” Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician and global-health expert at Stanford, told us. Its only true dictate—and even this one’s shaky, depending on whom you ask—is a modicum of predictability in the average number of people who catch and pass on a pathogen over a set period of time.

Endemicity, then, just identifies a pathogen that’s fixed itself in our population so stubbornly that we cease to be seriously perturbed by it. We tolerate it. Even catastrophically prevalent and deadly diseases can be endemic, as long as the crisis they cause feels constant and acceptable to whoever’s thinking to ask. In a rosy scenario, reasonably high levels of population immunity could bring the virus to heel, and keep it there; its toll would be roughly on par with the flu’s. As coronavirus cases drop from their Omicron highs in the United States and other countries, there’s at least some reason to hope things are bending in that direction. But at its worst, endemicity could lock us into a state of disease transmission that is perhaps as high as some stretches of the pandemic have been—and stays that way.

If endemicity contains a world of possibilities, not all of them good or even better, then it makes a poor goal, and an impractical conceptual framework for any action aimed at managing COVID in the months, years, and decades ahead. Simply declaring endemicity gets us nowhere. It doesn’t answer the real questions about what we want our relationship with this virus to be. And it doesn’t erase the difficult decisions we’ll need to make if we plan to shape that future, rather than risk letting the virus make our choices for us.

It is an unfortunate coincidence that the word endemic begins with end. The arrival of endemicity is actually the beginning—of a long and complicated relationship between a pathogen and its host population. En demos. In the people.

Exactly what kind of long and complicated relationship endemicity denotes, though, is impossible to say, even for experts. “It’s a very nonspecific notion,” Karan said. “There’s really no definition of endemic,” Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told us. And the word is so “muddy and misused” that it’s “really hard to pin down why someone is using it wrong,” Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told us. We spoke with more than a dozen experts for this article, and nearly every one of them explained endemicity differently.

For some, endemicity entails a disease with stability, constancy. For others, it means one that concentrates in a specific geography. Some think a degree of predictability is a prerequisite; some do not. Others still adhere to a more technical definition: Endemicity refers to a state in which over, say, a year, each person who catches an infection will on average transmit it to one other person, so that the overall case burden neither rises nor falls. Much of the population has at least some immune protection, and the spread of the disease is limited by the rate at which vulnerable people are introduced (or reintroduced) into the population, by birth or waning immunity. Think of a bathtub with water flowing in and draining out at the same rate. But some experts think that notion’s too strict: Any amount of sustained spread, however turbulent, can qualify as endemicity.

What experts do agree on is that endemicity is not monolithic. The water in that tub might be hot or cold; the level it plateaus at can be very high or very low. The world’s pathogens run the gamut. Viruses such as herpes simplex 1, which causes cold sores and, less commonly, genital herpes, are considered endemic throughout the world. In the United States, HSV-1 affects, by some estimates, at least half of Americans, though most of the infections are asymptomatic or not terribly severe, especially among adults. Malaria, meanwhile, sickens more than 200 million people a year, and kills at least 400,000, most of them under the age of 5. That, too, is endemicity.

Then there are flu viruses—so often held up as the paragon of endemicity, but actually a better example of just how absurdly confusing endemicity can get. In most places, flu viruses are seasonal, surging in the fall and winter, then subsiding in the warmer months. (They circulate year-round in parts of the tropics.) But they can also erupt into pandemics, as they did in 1918, 1968, and 2009, then tick back down. Flu is one of many examples that show why endemic can’t be thought of as the inverse of pandemic; the two terms are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Endemic doesn’t mean the virus is “suddenly not going to hurt us,” Murray said.

Flu viruses actually present such a bizarre case of boom and bust that many researchers don’t consider them to be endemic at all. The experts we spoke with were pretty much evenly split among saying Flu is endemic, Flu is not endemic, and some version of Who knows? or It depends. This set of viruses, the not-endemic camp argues, are just too erratic to warrant the label, even when flu doesn’t reach pandemic proportions. The seasonality seems reliable, but that may not be enough to count as stable. The magnitude and severity of these annual-ish cycles can vary widely; some strains will play nicer with humans than others. One year, a flu virus will kill about 10,000 Americans. Another year, it will kill six times that. The question of the flu’s endemish nature takes on an almost existential cast: What does it mean to expect something?

Others in the not-endemic camp contend that, in addition to being too unpredictable, the flu is also too global. An endemic pathogen, they say, must be restricted to a population in a specific geographical region, rather than “just everywhere,” Seema Lakdawala, a flu virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told us. (The CDC agrees.) The Emory University virologist Anice Lowen, meanwhile, isn’t so bothered by the flu’s ubiquity. “I would call it endemic to humans,” she said. Martin, of the University of Michigan, doesn’t put herself in either camp. “Things get wiggly,” she said, “when you’ve got something like the flu.”

Pretty much all we can say for sure about the flu is that—as Malia Jones, a population-health expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told us—it is “a huge pain in the butt, but also not a global pandemic, most of the time. Unfortunately, there is not a single word for that.”

Endemic or not, flu might still represent our best benchmark for what post-pandemic COVID will look like.

Yes, okay, it remains true: COVID is not the flu, especially not while the pandemic’s still raging, so many people around the world lack solid immunity to the new coronavirus, and variants burst out at blistering speeds. In the past two years, COVID has already killed more people than any flu pandemic we have on record. But the comparison becomes less fraught when we project a lot further—a lot further—into the future. Flu, fundamentally, is another respiratory virus that’s enmeshed itself quite messily into our population. Which makes it, “with caveats, an excellent model” for what might happen next, Martin told us.

Such familiarity might feel comforting, because flu has come to seem pretty normal to us—most people can visualize, maybe even shrug off, its threat. We name a season in honor of the flu; we design drugs and vaccines to battle it. In most of the world, we expect flu infections to intensify in the winter, then trail off again. We expect the viruses to batter older and immunocompromised people at higher rates. We expect our flu shots to slash the risk of hospitalization but allow for less severe infections, which are especially apt to spread among school-age kids. We know flu viruses can shape-shift enough while brewing in human or animal hosts to bamboozle even experienced immune systems, and that several of those strains and subtypes can trouble us with some regularity. We live with multiple post-pandemic flus, among them a muted descendant of the virus that caused the deadly 1918 pandemic. We can’t know what COVID’s future is, but flu offers concreteness where everything else feels like mush.

Then again, SARS-CoV-2 is nothing if not a maverick, and it may warp the already disorganized template that flu viruses offer. Like flu shots, COVID shots seem to provide pretty stalwart protection against severe disease, and are arguably much more adept at this job; immunized people infected with the virus are swifter at subduing and purging it than the uninoculated. But the immunity we raise against low-level infections of both flavors has proved to be far more fickle, and needs to be somewhat frequently topped off. Both types of viruses are also pretty ace at splintering themselves into new and sometimes unrecognizable forms. These complementary trends—forgetful bodies, fast-changing viruses—push us to dose against the flu every fall. We could very well need yearly shots for this coronavirus too. Or not. We could still hit the point where a fourth or fifth dose of an mRNA shot, or the introduction of a next-generation COVID vaccine, will lock our anti-infection defenses on high. (But don’t count on it: That threshold of protection is very difficult for our bodies to maintain.) Vaccination frequency will also depend on whether we’re satisfied with preventing severe disease and death or aim to stamp out as many infections as possible—a higher bar than we’ve set, so far, in our anti-flu efforts.

How fast and how drastically the coronavirus rejiggers its genome also matters. Flu viruses and coronaviruses are different enough that they can’t be expected to engineer their evolution in an identical way. SARS-CoV-2 has already lobbed several very successful variants at us: first Alpha, then Delta, and now Omicron. The next globe-trotting variant could be a descendant of any of these, or none of them; it could be more virulent, or less. Like Omicron, it will probably be able to sidestep several of our immune defenses, and just how much slipperiness this virus is capable of is “the big open question,” Katia Koelle, an evolutionary virologist at Emory, told us. Maybe the virus is already starting to exhaust its flexibility. Or perhaps the pace at which the coronavirus alters itself will eventually slow as it runs out of super-hospitable hosts, as our colleague Sarah Zhang has reported.

And SARS-CoV-2 could still break the bounds of seasonality, and become a near-year-round threat in some parts of the world, or all of it, which would complicate how and when we vaccinate. “I feel convinced that we’re going to have a winter season of it every year,” Martin told us. “But what’s going to happen outside of winter is the big question—are we going to have summer surges?”

All of these factors—human immunity, virus mutability, and how and when host and pathogen interact—will shape our experience of COVID as a disease. We still don’t know what future COVID will be like. During the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 has packed a far bigger wallop than the garden-variety flu, prompting more hospitalizations, as well as a bevy of chronic disease. This gap in severity might lessen as population immunity to the coronavirus continues to build through reinfections and revaccinations, but maybe not. SARS-CoV-2 also seems to spread faster than flu viruses, so far. If that pattern holds, that trait, combined with a decent bit of immune-slipperiness, could mean more COVID than flu overall—both on population and individual scales.

The transition between pandemic and post-pandemic also can’t be expected to happen in an instant. We may not know what future COVID looks like until we get there. Given everything we still don’t understand, “like the flu” could actually be an underestimate of the twists and turns ahead.

Even if COVID somehow perfectly pantomimes the flu, that should not come as a relief. “What we’re basically saying is we’re accepting another disease that kills 20,000 to 60,000 people a year,” Grad, of Harvard, said. That’s on top of the many, many other microbes that may pile into our airways during the chilly winter months—respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, other coronaviruses, and a glut of different bacteria, just to name a few. The health-care system already struggles to shoulder this load during the winter, Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told us. Increasing it “would not be a trivial outcome.”

Yet we’re not at the mercy of the coronavirus’s whims. The post-pandemic period is an armistice between pathogen and host, and that means both parties get to dictate its terms. “You can have endemicity and have a lot of infections, or you can have endemicity and have very few infections,” Karan, of Stanford, told us. “What we do is what determines the difference between those two things.” That, in turn, reflects “how much we care” about a given disease, Brandon Ogbunu, an infectious-disease modeler at Yale, told us.

Endemic diseases, then, are the shades of suffering we’ve accepted as inevitable, no longer worth haggling down. The term is a resignation to the burden we’re left with. It can reflect unspoken values about whom that disease is affecting, and where, and the value we place on certain people’s well-being. Diseases such as malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis, which concentrate in less wealthy parts of the world, carry pandemic-caliber disease and death rates. And yet, they are commonly called endemic.

COVID could follow suit. Already, rich, Western countries have enjoyed plentiful access to vaccines and treatments. They’ll inevitably find themselves best equipped to declare the crisis over first. But that risks concentrating COVID in the parts of the world least able to fend it off. Claiming endemicity can be a way of shifting disease to the vulnerable, and declaring these inequities tolerable.

The enormous range contained by the endemic umbrella also showcases how human intervention can affect a disease’s impact. We can usher in endemicity (or something like it) by hastening a pandemic’s end. We can reduce endemicity’s boil to a simmer, or entirely ice it out. The level at which a disease first lands doesn’t have to be where it stays. We managed to eradicate smallpox, a once-endemic disease. Polio is in retreat as well, though the COVID pandemic has set many efforts back. Measles, formerly endemic to the United States, now causes only very infrequent outbreaks among Americans, though it is still found in many places abroad. Even malaria, though still a long way off from eradication, has become more manageable than it was before, thanks to dedicated prevention and management campaigns that have equipped at-risk populations with better access to vaccines, treatments, and mosquito control. The World Health Organization has declared its aim to slash malaria cases by at least 90 percent by 2030.

Our window to permanently purge SARS-CoV-2 from the planet has already slammed shut; it’s too widespread, and too many animal species can catch it, and our vaccines are imperfect shields against it. We probably won’t ever eradicate endem-esque influenza either, for very similar reasons, Lakdawala, of the University of Pittsburgh, said. But between what we’re dealing with now and total extinction, there’s a lot of room to “reduce flu’s burden considerably,” she told us. For a while, we inadvertently did: The viruses that cause it all but vanished during our first full pandemic winter, thanks to the masks, school closures, and physical distancing so many people took on to curb the coronavirus’s spread. Preserving just a few of the least disruptive infection-control strategies post-pandemic, even partially, could greatly reduce the flu’s annual toll. COVID’s march toward maybe-endemicity is an opportunity to “reflect on how many different diseases are out there that are preventable,” Grad said.

Using the term endemic imposes a false sense of certainty on a fundamentally uncertain situation. “Everybody wants it to be simplified, but there is so much that we don’t understand yet,” Lakdawala told us. “We’re trying to cram it all into one word, and one word doesn’t cut it.” When we fail to consider the many possibilities that lie ahead—when we treat endemicity as unitary—the term becomes fatalistic. To say that the pandemic will give way to endemicity is to suggest a single end point; saying that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic suggests that what comes next is up to the pathogen alone. But the post-pandemic phase will be shaped by the choices and actions we make. If our future with it is a truce we strike with the virus, it’s one that we can renegotiate, over and over again.

The Atlantic’s COVID-19 coverage is supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Jacob Stern is an assistant editor at The Atlantic. Katherine J. Wu is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers science.


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