#average GDA interaction

[drroxxyred]

Yo, Donald chill 😔

[assassin-artist]

okay, I'll post what I've got for Sindra now. Plus an alternate version for if she were a Viltrumite herself (: lore rambling below the cut

Calling her species 'Vottan'. They're a healer-based society of people with hollow bones, it makes them very fast but also very fragile. Big culture based around worshipping life and birth, which is why being a healer is such a high position of authority. Most Vottan become healers, but only a rare percentage of the people are born with healing magic. Sindra, having been born with the gift, was raised in something like a monastery to become a healer from a young age. They take a vow of silence when they reach adulthood, which is the same time they get their markings that deign them a full-fledged healer (the diamond on Sindra's forehead).

Their healer culture is very judgment free, i think. They believe that it's not their place to judge whether an individual 'deserves' to live or die for what they've done, only that if they are capable of healing, then they will heal. Their fragile physiology combined with their willingness to medically aid anyone who comes their way made it very easy for Viltrum to take their home planet and subjugate the people. Most healers are left to their own devices, but the rare few that are born with the gift of magic in their veins are taken to be personal Viltrumite healers on the Viltrum warships. Vottan lifespans on average are longer than humans, roughly expecting to live to ~150 years before dying of complications due to old age. However, those born with magic have a significantly increased life expectancy, expected to live somewhere around ~2,000 years before old age.

Taking inspiration from hummingbirds here when I say that I don't think they sleep at all - instead they go into a state of dormancy every few hours where their heart rate and metabolism is slowed significantly to conserve energy for a while.

hm.... that's all the lore for her species i've thought up at this point. Let me know if you have any questions (: Now I talk a little bit about her personal story..

I made her mainly to be a Conquest ship, because I like the idea of the big scary strong man having a fragile partner. Her people being subjugated by Viltrum was just the convenient excuse so I could say Sindra and Conquest have known each other for years before the events of Invincible even happen. I don't have a set age for her but I'm thinking at least over a century by now, so they've been buddies for around 50 years or so. Maybe. I'll do the math some other time, I'm just vibing rn. Conquest still doesn't get someone to talk to because his companion is silent, but, despite her inherent fragility and Conquest's inherent overwhelming strength, she has never been all that afraid of him. I think a species that worships life would have a more accepting view of death as well - it's to be avoided if possible, but not something you should fear and dread. Plus, I've talked before on my blog about how I don't think Conquest would actually struggle to be gentle, so I think it wouldn't be that difficult for them to become close. In fact, I dare say I think Conquest would be gentler with her than any of the other Viltrumites would be... i rotate them in my head. my silly aliens

I like the idea that she eventually finds her way to Earth before season 1 begins, but I don't really have a reason for why she left the Viltrumites just yet. Maaaaybe someone lost their cool and attacked her for whatever reason and she just flew away, never looking back? I'm not sure, I'll have to think more on that. I just like imagining her on Earth trying to learn how to get along with humans and interacting with the main cast of the show.. She really just goes where she's told to go and heals anyone she comes across, so she would be a great find for the GDA. I think she would really like Damien Darkblood (:

I think she would eventually break her vow of silence and begin speaking again, but I'm just not sure if it's while with the Viltrumites (her first words would be to Conquest for sure) or while she's on Earth...

that's all the rambling i have off the top of my head. im sure i'll have more soon enough o7

[shirlleycoyle]

Landlords Want to Make Virtual Reality Just as Hellish as Real Life

Once a geeky thought experiment about forgoing the physical world and entering a fully-functional virtual reality, the “Metaverse” is now being colonized by the most unlikely industry: real estate. 

In late December, Dirk Lueth watched in awe as the New York Stock Exchange building was auctioned off for $23,000 in Upland, a video game-cum-cryptocurrency that Lueth had co-founded. Over the past few years, Upland has been auctioning off various landmarks in the Metaverse, and Luether was surprised at the price that the property had reached. “The player declared himself as a ‘Bitcoiner,’ and said he’s always been keen to get the New York Stock Exchange,” Lueth told Motherboard.

Other than having a virtual skin that resembles the NYSE, the building had no connection to the physical, real-world building. Nonetheless, in Upland’s Metaverse real estate market, the location had value. The buyer might be buying the property with the intention to create a Metaverse stock exchange, said Lueth, or simply to have as a collector's item that could be bought and sold down the line.

While cryptocurrency zealots looking to upend the traditional stock market (in a video game populated by cute and harmless-looking avatars) might constitute a good portion of the Metaverse fan base, more mainstream real estate interests are also getting involved. They're being drawn by the sudden decline in the commercial property market, and the possibility of a virtual hellworld crafted by landlords themselves.

The concept of the Metaverse isn’t a particularly new idea. It’s usually attributed to the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who first used the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, a book that was integral to early utopian ideas taken up by Silicon Valley CEOs. But the prospect of a virtual reality working up against our physical world is an idea that goes back to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. What makes the vision shared by Upland and others from the cryptocurrency scene so distinct is the possibilities of cutting Plato’s cave shadows up into individual lots and then selling them back to the people chained to the wall, so that they too, can own a piece of the shadow world.

A far cry from the damp philosophising of Plato’s cave, the corporate conference economy has spasmed and dried up rapidly in the wake of the pandemic, and is now turning its attention to the Metaverse, said Mike Gedye, an executive at CBRE, a Fortune 500 real estate firm. With the buzz around “virtual HQs,” Gedye sees work, not play, as the driving force behind the Metaverse, particularly as young employees come to acclimate to the online workplace. 

“The biggest barrier of the transformation of work into the virtual has been a loss of human contact,” Gedye told Motherboard. He was recently the co-author of a CBRE briefing note that laments the end of the “spontaneous corridor collision” among co-workers in office environments. The Metaverse is a way to reintroduce conference networking as well as productivity-enabling aspects of human interaction in the workplace. “Why couldn't you create that Metaverse for work?” said Gedye. “If you can do that and enhance the profit of an organization, then it's likely to be accelerated.” 

Like all sound and well-reasoned financial instruments, nobody knows what the Metaverse will constitute, or how it will run. In Decentraland, another virtual platform controlled by a type of automated corporation called a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, virtual properties have sold for as much as $200,000 (in its cryptocurrency equivalent). Somnium Space, The Sandbox, High Fidelity, and Cryptovoxels are other platforms that have staked their claim for the Metaverse, all with varying sets of rules. The basic principles of the Metaverse, as outlined by former Amazon Studios strategist Matthew Ball in an influential essay about the concept, is that it be continuous, real-time, spanning across the real world and the online, and having a fully functioning economy. 

A screenshot from the trailer for Upland, a virtual real estate game with its own cryptocurrency.

There has yet to be a dominant, large-scale virtual reality that can lay claim to the idea of the Metaverse. In April, the video game Fortnite was crowned as the new frontier—the best gamble on a virtual world where you might bump into someone at the water cooler. Fortnite, which is owned by Epic Games, held a series of Travis Scott concerts from inside of the game, with users mulling around and socializing as the event took place. 

“Just as every company a few decades ago created a webpage, I think we're approaching the point where every company will have a real-time live 3D presence” Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, told the LA Times after the event. Epic Games has been actively courting real estate, too, coming on as major sponsors for a property technology conference earlier this month. Sweeney, of course, wants Fortnite to be the platform that can provide that real-time live 3D presence. But the composition of the Metaverse is likely to be much more complex. 

From a real estate perspective, the hope is that people will not only attend events, but inhabit, spend money, and, hopefully, work in the all-encompassing Metaverse. Simple enough. Heavy footfall areas will allow for more desirable virtual advertising space and storefronts for e-commerce. “We were inspired by Monopoly,” said Lueth, referring to a game that was originally created to demonstrate the horrors of extractive rentierism and undying corporate greed. 

But Lueth explains that the first steps to day-to-day retail will inevitably be real world storefronts that also have a virtual presence, blending the worlds together. Sell a bouquet of flowers in the real world, and let your customers buy a bouquet of flowers in the Metaverse. 

The blending of worlds is where the Metaverse really gets interesting, from a commercial real estate perspective. “I think the true value of the metaverse is when you have virtual worlds and physical worlds—when you start to have multiple [worlds] colliding,” Alex Turner, a consultant with CBRE, told Motherboard. 

From the cryptocurrency side, the future of the Metaverse is one which leads to decentralized property trading across a broad base of users, who conventionally now have a real use for cryptographic tokens. The real estate world looks towards a landlord-led model, where large property owners lead the charge, buying up the Metaverse and letting consumers wander around listlessly. Or, as the CBRE puts it, the Metaverse has the potential to “reimagine the boundaries of what it means to be online or offline, reality or fantasy, working or living.” 

While some theorists have called for online public parks, the fastest push into the Metaverse will be from mixed-use commercial spaces. According to Gedye, sites such as work-live developments and coworking spaces are already offering a comprehensive lifestyle brand. You already have a fob to get into the building, so why not an avatar and access to a parallel Metaverse workplace?

In December, a company called Metaverse Property announced itself as the first virtual real estate outfit, backed by GDA Capital, a cryptocurrency trading firm. Metaverse Property announced that its intentions weren’t limited to just offering buying and selling within the metaverse, but virtual property management—presumably with an eye towards the rental market.

For CBRE, the promise is less in shiny things, and more in controlling the interaction between the Metaverse and the real world.

Turner, the CBRE consultant, points out that China’s tech scene is showing a keen interest in the Metaverse, with online shopping festivals, group buying and digital wallets (like Alipay and WeChat) helping to speed up the process. As tech writer and business strategist Packy McCormick writes, productivity software is the next obvious move for Tencent’s ambitions in the Metaverse.

The move to the Metaverse will be, at the end of the day, a lot more boring than we expect. According to Lueth, Upland players spend an average of $225 USD in the Metaverse, hoping to become landlords of their own. It’s small fish, considering that the internet has been dominated by rent-extracting monopolistic forces for decades now. 

“Apple is a landlord of apps, Amazon is a landlord of retail and Netflix is a landlord of media,” explains Gedye. Real estate bros might be angling to turn the idea of virtual reality into one giant property market, but can we really blame them? Maybe not in this world, but the dream is that they’ll be ready to shoulder some of the blame in the next one, wherever that may be.

Josh Gabert-Doyon is London-based writer and radio producer focused on tech, labour, and culture. He tweets at @JoshGD

Landlords Want to Make Virtual Reality Just as Hellish as Real Life syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[democracyinternational]

Three New Year’s Resolutions for Better Evidence-based Programming in 2017

By Dr. Aaron Abbarno Senior Evaluation Specialist

Washington, DC – By now the phrase “evidence-based programming” and what it entails are familiar enough to development practitioners: stop listening solely to your gut and let the data speak; ditch assumption-heavy theories and leverage what we know; and evaluate activities rigorously and build what we learn into future programs. We need more of this in 2017, particularly in the field of Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG). The DRG community should strengthen evidence-based programming in the new year in three ways: consume more data, read peer-reviewed journals, and double-down on impact evaluation.

Resolution 1: Consume more data A wealth of new data is now available to inform innovative development programming, strengthen theories of change, and measure program effectiveness. To start, spend some time exploring these four sources:

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Database includes over 350 indicators of political system quality covering more than 170 countries, from 1900 to 2016. The nimble online dataset offers users calibrated indices that represent major concerns to DRG practitioners, such as clean elections, women’s political empowerment, and civil society participation. V-Dem is built on objective, factual information from government documents and multiple subjective, expert ratings. Unlike other databases that rely on subjective expertise, V-Dem produces confidence intervals around each point estimate giving users a clear vision of experts’ level of disagreement on key questions.

The International Political Economy (IPE) Data Resource standardizes and merges 951 variables from 78 major IPE data sources—including, among others, the World Bank, Transparency International, Polity IV, Bertelsmann Transformation Index, and the Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights Dataset—into a single dataset. The IPE Data Resource is updated annually and is available to the public. It serves largely as a tool for active scholars; familiarity with data management and analysis is required for optimal use.

USAID’s Economic Analysis and Data Services (EADS) provides a hand-selected group of indicators from trusted sources like Freedom House and Transparency International disaggregated by sector: DRG, gender, education, hunger and food security, health, economy, trade and investment, and climate change. The EADS’ most useful contribution is the country trend information that is plotted against regional and income-group averages in interactive graphs.

The Governance Data Alliance (GDA) Dashboard is the DRG sector’s first compilation of all topline indicators from practitioners’ most commonly used data sources. The dashboard economizes data search and comparison. It continues to expand in functionality, and users are able to compare countries across discrete time intervals on a wide range of political and economic health scores. The dashboard format also reveals data gaps, which may prompt efforts to fill them.

Resolution 2: Check your assumptions  Widely read outlets like the Journal of Democracy and Foreign Affairs are important venues for big and new ideas. Some of the DRG sector’s most fundamental assumptions find support in their pages. However, claims in these journals are not necessarily backed by evidence that has been peer-reviewed.

Some claims must enjoy more objective support than others if we are to make sense of the world and know whether to update our views in light of new evidence. Peer-review evaluates the veracity of an argument against transparent standards. Authors must demonstrate that their work meets these standards, and authors and peer-reviewers are always unknown to each other. By definition, peer-reviewed journals publish evidence that passes more stringent quality control than evidence published in journals that are not peer-reviewed.

DRG practitioners should continue to read widely, but it remains our responsibility to know when evidence supports or subverts our hunches. A great place to start to look for that evidence is the Annual Review of political science or sociology. Evidence reviews, working papers, and policy briefs produced by academic think tanks, like University of California’s Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) or Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), or V-Dem, which has its own working papers series, are even more attuned to the needs of practitioners. It also helps to keep an eye on new public outlets that scholars have for their work, including the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, which occasionally presents research of direct relevance to foreign assistance in the DRG sector. However, use caution; some of this work is printed before it has been vetted by peer-review.

Resolution 3: Learn about impact evaluation Correlation does not imply causation. In fact, few development professionals know what does. Three basic criteria must be satisfied to justify a causal claim: a cause must occur before an effect, the cause and effect must be correlated, and no other potential causes of the effect can explain that effect. For example, ice cream consumption and drowning correlate because both occur more often during summer months.

Demonstrating that DRG programs are responsible for the outcomes we observe is tricky because we often cannot rule out a “spurious relationship,” an apparent connection between a cause and effect that is in fact explained by something else entirely. Impact evaluation is an evaluation design that specializes in excluding these alternative, lurking causes from the equation.

Impact evaluation is not always appropriate—analysis of population-based survey data is better for generalizable claims, for example. However, if you want to answer a question about cause and effect, you’ll need to grapple with the problem of spuriousness and, for that, you’ll need an impact evaluation.

Familiarize yourself with the problem of spuriousness. Start with some humorous correlations, and then get serious: try to identify a spurious relationship in your own work. You can go the extra mile and expose yourself to the logic of impact evaluations, which are designed to effectively exclude alternative, lurking causes. Take an online course, like J-PAL’s 5-day Executive Education program, which is now free and online. Or apply to a workshop, such as EGAP’s Learning Days. Or read a good book on the subject, like Running Randomized Evaluations.

Make 2017 the year we use the data that is available to supplement our work and improve our programming. Let’s resolve to read more widely and subject our conventional wisdom to challenges from outside the DRG environment. And learn about the tools we have to increase confidence in our causal claims. And, of course, lay off the carbs.