Friday, April 05, 2019

MEdia Dragon and Twitter: Six Ways To Make People Like You ;-)

Lawyers and Twitter: Six Ways To Make People Like You - Kevin O’Keefe: “I use Twitter more to give shout outs to the good stuff being done by others than to broadcast about LexBlog and our doings. I’ve always had a hard time believing I did something that qualified for bragging. Maybe that’s my Irish Catholic roots and my being an entrepreneur my whole life — nothing’s ever good enough and there’s no reason not to feel guilty. Selfishly though, it just always felt good to make others feel good about what they’re doing. Lawyers, the organizations supporting access to legal services and the innovators bringing us the future of the law also need an attagirl or attaboy now and again. Turns out that sharing the good of others, rather than talking about my company and our products, is the most effective method of business development I have ever used. Dale Carnegie, in one of the best-selling books of all time, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ laid out six business principles for making people like you – an essential he believe needed for business development. Each of Carnegie’s points apply to how you as a lawyer can use Twitter to make people like you…”

She emailed 35 people. Her former employee got $237,000.


'It's true companionship': He's biking around the world, with a cat on his back


A burly Scottish cyclist and a cat he found on the side of the road have become a social media sensation.




Blockchain


Bridget J. Crawford (Pace), Blockchain Wills, 94 Ind. L.J. ___ (2019):

Blockchain technology has the potential to radically alter the way that people have executed wills for centuries. This Article makes two principal claims – one descriptive and the other normative. Descriptively, the Article suggests that traditional wills formalities have been relaxed to the point that they no longer serve the cautionary, protective, evidentiary and channeling functions that scholars have used to justify strict compliance with wills formalities. Widespread use of digital technology in everyday communications has led to several notable cases in which individuals have attempted to execute wills electronically. These wills have had a mixed reception. Three states currently recognize electronic wills and the Uniform Law Commission is drafting a model Electronic Wills Act This Article identifies some of the weaknesses in existing state statutes and the model law and considers how technology can address those problems.



How to Translate Languages With Google Sheets - Lifehacker: “There are more efficient ways of keeping track of important foreign language vocabulary than a hand-held dictionary. If you’re learning a new language or making basic translations, try using the Google Translate formula in Google Sheets for an easy access list of what you know—or want to know…”



In Fiction, The Shadow Of Slavery Is Deep



Writers focusing on the time period itself, and its long aftermath, have a lot of conflicting desires for their books. “What comes across in all of the writing on the Atlantic slave trade is the sustained tension between a determination to close the chapter on slavery and the desperate fear of forgetting.” – The Guardian (UK)

Source is an OpenNews projectdesigned to amplify the impact of journalism code and the community of developers, designers, journalists, and editors w”ho make it.”

Our Search for the Best OCR Tool, and What We Found: A side-by-side comparison of seven OCR tools using multiple kinds of documents, from Factful – There are a lot of OCR options available. Some are easy to use, some require a bit of programming to make them work, some require a lot of programming. Some are quite expensive, some are free and open source. We selected several documents—two easy to read reports, a receipt, an historical document, a legal filing with a lot of redaction, a filled in disclosure form, and a water damaged page—to run through the OCR engines we are most interested in. We tested three free and open source options (Calamari, OCRopus and Tesseract) as well as one desktop app (Adobe Acrobat Pro) and three cloud services (Abbyy Cloud, Google Cloud Vision, and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision). All the scripts we used, as well as the complete output from each OCR engine, are available on GitHub. You can use the scripts to check our work, or to run your own documents against any of the clients we tested…”





The Exquisite Awkwardness Of Literary Parties


 It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much. – Paris Review - Reminds me of conversations about what is for dinner tonight - literary gurus Rebecca Kaiser and Ian Thackeray 








Please Stop Harassing Writers While They’re Working



And in specific, stop harassing Asian Americans authors. Listen to author R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries) discuss her experiences at literary events: “Aside from the colorist comments about my skin, some of these words — adorable, cute, silky, shiny — could be taken, incorrectly, as compliments. I acknowledge that there’s luck, and privilege, in inhabiting a body that others might find appealing. But when I’m at these events, I am at work. I am talking about my profession, not about my hair or skin or any perceived cuteness.” – The New York Times


Assange to be expelled from Ecuadorian embassy 'within hours or days': WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is claiming that founder Julian Assange will be expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been since 2012.








They Say Blockchain Is Going To Revolutionize The Publishing Business. Is This Just Hype?

Perhaps not since the advent of the internet itself has a single technology buzzword captured the imagination of so many. Book publishing is no exception: a growing number of startup companies, people in existing companies, and investors are touting the promise of blockchain technology for publishing. Meanwhile, skeptics say that blockchain cannot possibly live up to all the hype. – Publishers Weekly


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Britain’s Largest Bookstore Chain Says It Can’t Afford To Pay A Living Wage