Tech

477 posts

Simple Rules: Winning at LinkedIn

64 comments

In this installment of the DoW’s simple rules we look at how to win at LinkedIn.

Rule 1:  You can’t win if you don’t play

  • Open an account.  Some of you may be resisting because you’re the same kind of people who are too cool for Facebook.  Get over yourself, this is for your own good.

Rule 2: Be a connector

  • Don’t wait for people to connect to you.  Initiate contact.
  • First build up your connections with people you know well.
  • Next move on to auxiliary contacts.

Rule 3: Connect early and often

  • When you meet someone send them a request shortly after your meeting.  You will be fresh in their mind and your relationship will be obvious to them.

Rule 4:  Connect with recruiters

  • LinkedIn is swarming with recruiters.  If you don’t know any ask some of your connections.  They’ll give you a list that’s appropriate to your field.
  • When a recruiter reaches out to you always respond even if you’re not interested.  You never know when you might need their help.

Rule 5:  Be complete

  • Fill out your profile with as much information as possible and use a professional looking picture.
  • Ask for recommendations and recommend others.

Those are the basics.  Sound off with your own suggestions in the comments.

The Latest In Nonsensical “Anti-Piracy” Arguments

34 comments

So this article is from a South African publication, but its statistics were compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the attitudes expressed in it are indicative of those opposed to piracy. It also exemplifies the contradictory arguments made by those who champion big labels’ rights to continue overcharging for obsolete media formats.

The piece shows its hand in the first line: “Digital piracy is inhibiting the growth in the legitimate digital market in SA.” You’d expect that the article would attempt to prove this thesis with corroborative facts and figures, right?

PWC also points out that, while the digital market is still very young, growth is expected to continue over the same forecast period.

“Digital has been increasing and spending will more than triple from R130 million in 2009 to R425 million in 2014, with an average compound annual growth of 26.7%,” PWC says.

Ah yes, piracy is killing the “legitimate” digital music market so much that the market is expected to “more than triple” over the next five years. The article then goes on to mention that sales of physical CDs will continue to decline, and it doesn’t event attempt to pin this on piracy. In fact, it ends with a quote from an industry executive who admits that “prices for digital formats are significantly lower than that for physical formats and this will result in a shift in the consumption between the two.”

Meanwhile, CrunchGear reports that the Hot New Rumor is that “music piracy has all but disappeared.” It’s true that music is no longer the most pirated file type–that distinction goes to movies and porn–but then the author ends his post with a bit of editorializing:

Not that this means anything, but I genuinely don’t know anybody who still downloads anything from public BitTorrent trackers. You’d be a fool to do so in 2011. That’s not to say that private BitTorrent sites aren’t still popular—they are, and they’re generally of a very high quality—but the days of the public BitTorrent tracker being the “go-to” place to grab your “stuff” surely has fallen out of favor within my sphere of influence.

And this seems to be the source of recent confidence in music piracy’s demise. But, um, I only use BitTorrent trackers for live audio rips, out-of-print releases, and hi-fidelity versions of music I already own. Where do the kids get most of their music these days?

They get it from Google. All they have to do is Google the name of the album they want and follow it with “Mediafire” or “Rapidshare” or even just “zip” or “rar.” The RIAA and MPAA have been catching on as of late–the MPAA recently sued Hotfile, for example–but this is a losing battle, because file hosting services themselves aren’t illegal. It’s the proliferation of “pirated” files on these services that rankles the industry. Any attempt to shut down a service like Mediafire will probably fail, for one of several reasons:

  1. There are, believe it or not, legitimate uses for file-hosting services like Hotfile and Mediafire, and banning these services outright would be seen as an unfair attack on their legal users.
  2. Moving your servers outside the U.S. makes it much more difficult for groups like the MPAA to sue you.
  3. It’s not Mediafire’s fault that people illegally upload copyrighted material to its site; it may or may not be their responsibility, depending on your perspective, but all shutting down Mediafire (or whatever site the industry’s attacking) will accomplish is getting someone somewhere to launch a new Mediafire. Ultimately, it’s end users’ responsibility to not illegally transfer files, and the RIAA stopped focusing on individual users back in 2008.

What can we learn from all this? Well, for one thing, industry leaders seem to be oblivious to the changing realities of online file sharing. Also, music piracy isn’t killing the industry as much as lawmakers and industry lobbyists would have you believe; according to Nielsen, digital album sales in the United States went up 13% in 2010.

Hitler’s Flying Saucers?

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The image at the beginning of this article is of a site in Germany known as The Henge (Fly Trap) where a magnetic levitation device – aka flying saucer – known as The Bell was reportedly developed by German scientists in the late 1930’s.

I watched a program the other night which I was surprised to see was not on the SciFi (SyFy) network, but on Canada’s History Television, one part in a series on the subject of extraterrestrials.  What follows is the network’s description of this episode.

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Ancient Aliens: Aliens and the Third Reich

If ancient aliens visited Earth in the remote past, could they have given us advanced technology, passed down through human history?And could this technology have helped the Third Reich build mysterious weapons and crafts far beyond the limits of 20th century science?

During World War II, there were reports that the Germans built an operational flying saucer, known as the Hanebu, which was said to use mythical technology found in ancient Indian texts. Another craft was rumored to have been constructed with the help of psychics and mediums who claimed to have received detailed blueprints from extraterrestrial beings.

Is it possible Hitler’s quest for world domination was aided and abetted by ancient extraterrestrial technology that was rediscovered? And could the allegedly rebuilt alien devices developed in Germany have played a role in America’s ability to land a man on the moon?

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The program posited that a number of Nazi scientists were recruited by the American government after the fall of the Third Reich. According to the show, these scientists were almost entirely responsible for the technology that resulted in the U.S. space program and putting the first man on the moon, aided in part by alien intelligence which had been passed on to them.  They cited Adolf Hitler’s devotion to occult mysticism as the impetus for the extraterrestrial contact.

The episode ended by purporting that many Nazi officers who disappeared after the fall of Berlin had actually been whisked away in a time machine. As if by means of validation they mentioned that Albert Einstein had deemed time travel to be theoretically possible.

My questions to you interesting – and hopefully interested – folks are such: (1) Why was this on a history channel? and (2) How fine is the line between genius and insanity?

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Smartphones and QR

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Forget hashbangs.

With the advent of smartphones with cameras and barcode scanners come QR as advertisement. I noticed this billboard for a local (and annoying) restaurant go up last month:Chino Latino

That square in the middle is a QR code, if you scan it from the street with your phone, it will reveal a special (or whatever information they choose to encode in it).

This isn’t new technology, but its emergence as an advertising tool – especially as an advertising tool that many people can use – is somewhat new.

You can turn pretty much anything made of content into one of these little codes:

Like text:

qrcode

URLs:

qrcode

Even SMS messages:

qrcode

There are a bunch of generators to play with, so go nuts.

Japanese Robot Babies: because not enough people think robots are going to take over the world

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Check this little guy out! A group of scientists at Osaka University designed him to make realilistic human expressions in an attempt to study human social development between parents and children. There’s some scientist who is totally marking off a graph being really pissed off that he can’t find a suitable control model for his experiments because some babies are happier than others, and dreaming up this little abomination. They tried using robots in the past, but the robots didn’t work “in a natural way” and therefore the parents didn’t interact properly with them.  Video of them in action:

I don’t know about you, but look at those eyes. I’d totally name him “Shifty.” He needs some servos adjusted, stat!

Here he is, without the “realilistic” skin! :

Look! The full range of emotions!:

I hope they never show this infographic to “parents” in the study:

Totally creepy, but I think it could be viable. For all of those people out there who are stuck in their phones updating facebook and think that social interaction in over 140 characters is taxing- there’s a companion for you! The maternal/paternal instinct in humans is huge! Make this thing Wi-fi, be able to download a playlist from iTunes and have a wireless charging platform (it already looks like it’s an Apple product) and make a billion dollars! Isn’t a new “Chucky” movie in production?

You can’t go back UPDATED

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The new Gawker will not brook dissent.  Nor will it tell you who took your star away.

This is a sign of maturity and respect, and not petty at all.

UPDATE: Remy Stern was behind my unstarring.  Here’s our brief back-and-forth:

Dear Remy,

I just lost my star, and I don’t know why. I also can’t see who unstarred me.

Here’s the offending comment: http://gawker.com/#!5757998/a-day-in-the-life-of-gawker-media?comment=36955123:36955123

I’d like an explanation, if it’s not too much trouble.

Thanks,

[redacted], aka Thunderclees

*****

I did.

Listen, we’re all frustrated with the new design and its gazillion tech issues. No one is more frustrated than us, since we have to use the system all day to post stories (and the back-end has just as many issues as the front) and we’ve been inundated with emails telling us how much we suck. We didn’t design it. We didn’t build it. But we’re gritting our teeth, trying to get through it, and looking forward to all the fixes that the tech team has promised us. Complain all you want in the comments of that post. But if you’re going to suggest people leave the site and go elsewhere, you’re not keeping your star. (If you’re abandoning the site, you won’t need it any longer anyway!) We’ve been through enough.

Remy Stern  |  Gawker.com
[email protected] |  (646) 912-8984

*****

Hi Remy,

Thanks for your reply and your candor. I didn’t realize that saying I was leaving was tantamount to encouraging others to do the same, but thanks for letting me know.

Best,

[redacted]

Life Science

26 comments

Whenever I tell people I’m interested in biological research, I nearly always hear, “Oh, are you going to cure cancer?” There is a winking intonation in this question. We won’t hold you to it, they say with their friendly smiles. I either respond with my easy refrain – “I’m more interested in function than health” – or a laugh and a shrug that drips with faux-modesty. That mantra ignores, of course, that understanding of function leads to technology.

These days, the vast majority of biological research is designed to create product. A cancer drug, an anti-aging technique, a soybean resistant to disease. Why? Because research is expensive – wildly so. No corporation will waste billions on research without an eye toward application. It reminds me of a creation of Margaret Atwood: Crake, a genius whose pragmatism is beyond the reach of empathy towards individuals. “Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition.” This is what biotech sells. Only the rich can afford it. The rest of humanity is left praying for a trickle down, decades after initial production – AIDS drugs, vaccinations. Voodoo medicine.

“Oh, are you going to cure cancer?” When I was in high school – long before I had much in the way of scientific predilection – I volunteered quite a bit. I spent some time with an organization that worked with pediatric oncology patients and their families. I played with kids before and during their chemo – puzzles, block games, cards. Exhausted parents would thank me as other volunteers whisked them away to ask how they were holding up.

While with the kids, I usually forgot everything, but every once in a while something would jolt me back. A needle bruise on a tiny arm, tear tracks on a mother’s face, a spot of blood from a bloody nose on a pair of light-up sneakers that could fit in my hand. The phone calls telling me my scheduled visit would no longer be needed. I would leave and sit in my car in the parking lot, slumped with exhaustion. I still remember the numbing tingle on my hands from where the steering wheel stitching dug in.

“Oh, are you going to cure cancer?”