The Pandemic Is Fueling Gaming, Sure, But Also A Game Category Called Just Chatting
Only connect, perhaps? Yes, Animal Crossing and Among Us are still popular, but “Just Chatting, which features people talking on camera about food, technology and other topics.” (And then there’s All Bad Cards, like an online version of Cards Against Humanity.) – Los Angeles Times
Applying insights from magic to improve deception in research
Highlights
• Researchers generally receive little training in experimental deception.
• Drawing on the field of magic, we present a novel model of effective deception.
• First, deception should have many “layers” rather than a single cover story.
• Second, these layers should be subtle rather than explicitly stated.
• We provide strategies for improving deception and thus the reliability of research.
And this:
Magicians have theorised that if tricks are too smooth and perfect, they end up seeming less impressive than ones with minor flaws (Kuhn, 2019).
Here is the article, by Jay A. Olson and Amir Raz
Like many, Lamb, when growing up, hoped to be the next great actor. But in late 2005, at age 47, that hadn't happened yet. As the New York Times reported, Lamb went down a different path: "he finds himself with six children, working as a computer programmer for Nationwide Insurance. Mr. Lamb has deep creases under his eyes, skin as pale as copy paper, precious little hair and no acting experience. Any notions he once held of becoming the next Sean Connery died long ago."
And yet, his dream, like him, didn't really die. He registered himself a website, DeadBodyGuy.com (which, unfortunately, is now a morass of tables and frustrating ads) and worked with his wife to create photos of him, dead, in various positions. (An spill down the stairs can be seen above.) Lamb's hope was that the website would spread virally throughout the Internet, ultimately catching the eye of a movie producer or two. Here's another picture of Lamb, dead, to help demonstrate that he isn't just a staircase-death expert; he was really good at being mostly dead.
Lamb's website worked. As the CBC reported, "six weeks [after he launched his website], his story landed on the front page of The New York Times. He then started landing interviews on CNN, Good Morning America and The Today Show about what he was doing." That last appearance caught the eyes of a TV producer, who invited Lamb to play a corpse in an episode of "What I Like About You." While uncredited, Lamb appeared on-screen for the first time dead. (Note that the interviews with CNN, GMA, and TODAY featured him alive, which wasn't his goal.) But with his limp foot in the door, more opportunities came his way.
As of 2019, Lamb now has fourteen film credits to his name, all of which are for laying there still, barely (and officially, not) breathing, eyes slightly ajar. And yes, in some of them (most notably, perhaps, the 2010 Danny Aiello comedy "Stiffs"), his name appears in the credits, just as he always wanted.
NYTimes: Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas.
…The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.
Such rapid growth is unrivaled in the history of corporate America….The closest comparisons are the hiring that entire industries carried out in wartime, such as shipbuilding during the early years of World War II or home building after soldiers returned, economists and corporate historians said.
Comparing Amazon’s surge in hiring to that which occurred in wartime is a good reminder that the government failed to create a surge in contract tracers despite the fact that contract tracing saves lives.
I applaud Amazon’s ability to respond to crisis/opportunity. I do, however, worry a little about this but not too much since it’s obviously false.
To grow so much, Amazon also needs to think long term, Ms. Williams said. As a result, she said, the company was already working with preschools to establish the foundation of tech education, so that “as our hiring demand unfolds over the next 10 years, that pipeline is there and ready.” Amazing Amazon - NYTimes
Managing Metadata: An Examination of Successful Approaches – If Google can deliver results across the entire internet in seconds, why do I have so much trouble finding things in my organization?” asked Jonathan Adams, Research Director at Infogix, at the DATAVERSITY® DGVision Conference, December 2019. In a presentation titled, “I Never Metadata I did Not Like” Adams outlined successful approaches to understanding and managing metadata – as reported by Amber Lee Dennis.
Finding Love (And Community) In Gaming
For many of us, virtual worlds are fertile ground for growing new friendships and romance. In online role-playing platforms, gamers may feel more confident in their social interactions than in real life because they can be seen exactly as they want to be seen, says Anthony Bean, a clinical psychologist in Fort Worth, Texas, and founder of Geek Therapeutics. – Wired
ATO jails international student for $117k tax return
oneliness Activate Same Part Of The Brain
“[This study] provides empirical support for the idea that loneliness acts as a signal—just like hunger—that signals to an individual that something is lacking and that it needs to take action to repair that.” – Smithsonian
“The Slow Race” is what we might call a light poem. It is not particularly philosophical, even if the river is life, and the walking is living. Yet, there is something right in Young’s description of the river, even if we have never seen it. The weir is a comb. The water is silver hair. The river is weighted down with “sky and earth.” A “flawed” turn does push the river back. Something true and irreducible about the inner qualities of the observable world has been stated.
Even in the Bible, as far as I can remember, the bad guys were tax inspectors: vindictive hoarders, on the whole, who viewed inflicting misery as a perk of the job. It was a stereotype as silly then, no doubt, as it is now. Yet even among the least villainous officials of biblical Judea, I find it hard to imagine that many were as warm and cheery as Mick Allcock at Bolton tax office. The tax inspector: Happy returns