Thursday, December 10, 2015

Three (Tri) Reasons Why Storytelling Works: Tall Tower Child

“My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a pencil and I can write with it and I can play with it.”
~ Rebecca West, Paris Review interview (Summer 1981)

Researchers can try storytelling as a presentation technique. Whether this is done by telling stories within a presentation or structuring the entire presentation with a narrative, storytelling offers three unique benefits 3 Reasons Why Storytelling Works


 That proposal or email you wrote must now compete for attention with Facebook and the Huffington Post. Here’s how to compete more effectively, and why you’re not doing it already.
10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them



Thomas Keneally likes to place characters in extreme situations where their humanity is tested:

‘Paradox is beloved of novelists.  The despised saviour, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool and the cowardly hero.’ 



Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author and Journalist David Maraniss talked about the four pillars of his writing process at the Poynter Institute 40th Anniversary Speaker Series. (Photo by Tom Cawthon)
Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author and Journalist David Maraniss talked about the four pillars of his writing process at the Poynter Institute 40th Anniversary Speaker Series. (Photo by Tom Cawthon)
David Maraniss views his writing process as a four-legged table. The Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post journalist shared his process Wednesday night as part of The Poynter Institute’s 40th Anniversary Speaker Series.
It’s a process that also includes ordering a tuna salad sandwich on rye, kicking off his shoes and strolling around the Post newsroom in his socks. It’s usually done in silence, unless he’s writing about Detroit. Then Motown lyrics blast through the house Writing

"Imagine having had the chance to sit at a desk next to Shakespeare as he wrote Hamlet? Or Nabokov while he dreamt up his nymphet? Or Agatha Christie while she composed stories starring Mrs. Marple or Hercule Poirot? That is precisely the privilege Cambridge lecturer Andy Martin was treated to over the course of a year during which internationally bestselling author Lee Child wrote Make Me, the 20th book in his Jack Reacher series. The result of their Johnson-Boswell-style partnership is Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me, subject of a recent QA between Child and Martin in The New York Times.

Two new anthologies expose the fault line of American fiction: the exclusive versus the eclectic. Missing from both is the truly avant-garde Antipodean Bohemians ;-) 

A storm front moves out to sea off  in Sydney last night

The importance of “What if?” Thinking about a counterfactual past reveals the importance of evidence and contingency. Stories like Cold River teach us about historical humility e »

I’ve been writing about Child’s Reacher series since 2007, and believe that the six-foot-five-inch former military major is one of fiction’s heroic figures. A brooding nomad blessed with both principle and pragmatism. For these reasons, this behind-the-scenes look into the largely invisible creative process of writing a book represents priceless value.
Why would so successful an author as Child lift the curtain? “I sort of thought: Maybe I can explain it, I’ve been doing it long enough,” he says. “Lots of readers ask me how I do this or that. I thought this was an opportunity to tell them. Or at least to figure it out for myself. Which is the main thing, to be honest. Normally, I operate in a fog of instinct.”  
Reacher Said Nothing belongs on the short shelf of great texts about literary craft that includes Stephen King’s On Writing, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. 
#A Seat Beside Master Child ...

German chancellor Angela Merkel has been named Time magazine’s person on the year. East German born Angela (Leipzig girl who loved dancing at illegally held discos circa 1974 ;-) is the fourth woman to win since 1927 ... The magazine cited her role in Europe's crises over migration and Greek debt. Mrs Merkel had provided "steadfast moral leadership in a world where it is in short supply ..." Europe’s most powerful leader is a refugee from a time and place where her power would have been unimaginable. The German Democratic Republic, where Angela Merkel grew up, was neither democratic nor a republic; it was an Orwellian horror show, where  the Iron Curtain found literal expression in the form of the Berlin Wall.

"The story of who is covering federal government is a striking illustration of the shifting power dynamics within American journalism at large. Reporters for niche outlets, some of which offer highly specialized information services at premium subscription rates, now fill more seats in the U.S. Senate Press Gallery than do daily newspaper reporters. " D.C.-based newspaper staff focus on Congress, but wire services account for most of what readers see – December 3, 2015.


The competition to be heard has never been greater. People have access to more content, at more speed and across more devices than ever before. How can brands cut through and build connections with people when the choice of what to engage with is so vast? The Attention Deficit: How brands can be heard in a world of media overload  

Whether you want people to like you, to agree with you, or to buy your products, use these tips to feel more powerful in your everyday interactions 11 incredible psychological tricks to get people to do what you want
 

This issue explores the challenges associated with measuring and understanding the way people think and act Understanding Society: The Perils of Perception

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, Phillip Rogaway, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, USA. December 1, 2015:
“Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. 



The work required now to have and develop a career as a writer is a full-time occupation. That is different (and requires different skills) from the art of writing itself. Is this such a bad thing? The New Republic

 Is is an Art to writr about the ten most boring places to live in Connecticut

Censys is a search engine that enables researchers to ask questions about the hosts and networks that compose the Internet. Censys collects data on hosts and websites through daily ZMap and ZGrab scans of the IPv4 address space, in turn maintaining a database of how hosts and websites are configured. Researchers can interact with this data through a search interface, report builder, and SQL engine. Details on the Censys architecture and functionality are available in our  research paper.”
A Search Engine Backed by Internet-Wide Scanning – Zakir Durumeric,David AdrianAriana MirianMichael BaileyJ. Alex Halderman 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’15)