#run all the raw data sets through my code

[dkettchen]

Now this may not seem like a massive change in format, but boy howdy do I feel proud of myself for writing the functions to automate this ehehehehehe (unfortunately for me ao3 ship stat op used a different formatting for the pre-2020 tables, so I'll have to write another function to sort those ones out too ToT)

[hand-written-dreams]

CRIMSON SHADE

Chapter 08

Set Fire to the Rain

But I set fire to the rain

Watched it pour as I touched your face.

- ( The song of this Chapter is 'Set Fire to the Rain' by Adele.)

What's one supposed to say when she is trapped in a box with her family's sworn enemy, with his thumb pressed against her pulse point as he promises to ruin her?

Probably nothing.

It would also probably be a sane move not to provoke him further.

But not today.

Today she hovers on the brink of insanity.

"Either you want to ruin me or you want to make me work for you. Choose your poison, Mr. Raizada," the words are ice chips, melting in her mouth.

She squares her shoulders. Her fingers wrap around his wrist one by one as she removes his hand from her skin. His palm glides along her neck. The roughness drags along. It burns. She grits her teeth to stop the tingling in her fingertips as they brush against his forearm when she lets his wrist go. Her red glass bangles clink softly against her quivering wrist.

"And if you’re going to ruin me, you better make it worth my while. Because I'm sure as hell not going to work for you under a threat," she lets out, emphasising the word 'threat'.

His eyes are radioactive, seeping into her bones and poisoning her core.

He leans in, bringing his lips close to her ear. She balls her fist to tame down a shiver that's threatening to run wild, as his stubble whispers against her cheek. Rose petals bloom across the skin, making her weightless.

"One day, Miss Gupta," his breath feathers over her ear. "I am going to collect that debt I owe you.'' His words are ghosts, lurking in the shadows. "....and you know what?" His voice grazes over her skin like sand against slik; coarse, raw and primal.  "........ You are going to enjoy repaying me."

She can't breathe. Whatever retorts she's formed in her mind are on the floor. Warm floods her skin as a sudden rage fills every fibre of her being. Her hands tremble as she clenches them into fists, nails digging into her palms.

The nerve of him!

The words replay in her mind, burning like a wildfire she can’t put out. Her fingertips burn with the desire to do something. Anything. She wants to hurt him, wants to shake that cold indifference off his face. She hates that about him the most, how he never loses control, never falters. She tries to breathe, to calm herself, but the knot in her chest only tightens.

He straightens up, holding her hazels in his caramel-browns and takes a few steps back to reach the opposite side. He dials a number and brings the phone to his ear without leaving her hazels, not even for a single second.

"We are done."

The elevator dings open, somewhere she doesn't know. She doesn't care at all. She is too busy taming the wildfire raging through her bones.

And with the ghost of a sardonic smirk, he strides down the empty hallway while she drills a hole in his back with her fiery gaze.

Oh no, we are not so done.

Why is Mr. 'we-are-done' so adamant about collecting a debt that she doesn't even consider one at all?

He is still that encrypted code she can’t crack. A code she has no desire to decode.

No, that's not true. She wants to burn the code. She wants to overwrite it, hack all the data and leak all of them over the network. She wanted to erase every trace of him and let all his data dissolve into static.

She doesn’t know if it’s possible to feel this level of hate that is coursing through her body.

No, no, no. They are not done.

Not yet.

When she exits the lift in the basement, she notices the crowd gathered, waiting for the elevator, and the electrician working frantically to ensure everything is alright. A restaurant executive rushes toward her, profusely apologizing for the inconvenience. She just smiles and says she's fine.

No harm done.

Not externally.

Then she realizes someone has rendered her ride back invalid. Very rudely.

She signs, attempting to call an Uber. She certainly isn't going to call Mr.Jha and explain the situation to him. She decides to wait in the lobby for her Uber.

Meanwhile, the sky keeps rumbling and the first drops of rain begin to fall, light at first, then more insistent. The soft pitter-patter turns into a steady rhythm. She watches as the rain pours down in sheets, blurring the view of the streetlights and cars, the cityscape dissolving behind a curtain of water.

Her fingers twitch slightly at her sides, wanting to reach out and touch the raindrops. The pull to step out into the rain consumes her. She envisions the water sliding down her arms, soaking her clothes until they cling to her like a second skin. The rain, pure and untamed, would wash away her chains, make her feel free.

Her phone rings. Her Uber is here.

The Uber moves slowly, cutting through the rain. The world seems distant, almost dreamlike. She leans slightly against the window, tracing the droplets that race down the glass. Her gaze flicks to the side mirror when she senses another car trailing behind, its headlights dimmed but unmistakably following her every turn. Her breath hitches as the car maintains a steady pace, neither speeding up nor lagging behind. It’s a sleek black vehicle, but the heavy downpour prevents her from seeing the license plate or the car model.

The wipers move in a rhythmic sweep over the windshield, almost in sync with the beating of her heart. There's an eerie precision in the way it follows, unhurried but deliberate, as if its driver has all the time in the world. Her fingers tighten around her phone.

She looks down at her phone, contemplating whom to call. She spares another glance outside, but the car has vanished into the rain. She lets out a sigh of relief, the tension in her shoulders easing as she chides herself for being unnecessarily paranoid.

The Uber entered a quiet, secluded stretch of a road and suddenly, the vehicle came to an abrupt halt, jolting her in the seat.

“What happened?”

“The tyre is punctured, ma’am. Just give me a few minutes. I’ll change it,” the driver replies, his tone apologetic as he steps out into the rain.

She sighs. It's a long night indeed. On this side of the city, she won't even find another transport. She glances at her phone. And, oh shit, it's dead. Fantastic.

The sound of laughter filters through the closed windows, drawing her gaze outside. Little boys and girls splash joyfully in the puddles, their feet kicking up water in playful abandon while their laughter echoes in the air. Their bodies move with a freedom she can't help but envy. Her fingers twitch as she watches them. Their carefree innocence tugs at the corners of her soul, begging her to let go. And with her heart in between her palms, she gives in and steps out of the car.

The rain cascades around her like a curtain of shimmering diamonds as it seeps into her hair and clothes. She extends her hand and clutches a fistful of rain. She feels the raindrops on her fingertips. They slide in, weaving their way through her fingers, into her palm. She looks up feeling the cool droplets kissing her skin. For one infinite moment, she feels free.

Her lips stretch as a laugh bubbles up inside. With a childlike giggle, she kicks off her heels, letting them tumble to the ground, and joins the children in their rhythmless dance. The puddles became her stage and the rain an enchanting symphony, drumming against the earth. The tinkling of her glass bangles joins in, singing the melody of joy.

Her skin starts burning as she feels the weight of being watched, but she is too lost in the magic of the moment to care.

She twirls and leaps, her movements mirroring the carefree abandon of the children, their laughter harmonizing with the whispers of the rain. The raindrops fold her into their arms and smile against her skin while the cold wind wraps around, braiding a soft magic through her hair.

The world around her transforms, where the rain is her elixir, dissolving chains around her. The raindrops become her feathers, glistening as they cling to her skin. They are the air under her wings, lifting her higher and higher. With each twirl and each spin, she sheds the shackles and spreads the wings like the bird she was born to be.

Lost in the rhythm of her movements, she loses her footing and slips, but instead of falling, a strong arm wraps around her as she collides into a hard chest. An Armani-clad chest.

In Charcoal black.

The world is eerily quiet and time becomes a broken hourglass bleeding seconds through sands, slipping beyond her reach as her fingers wrap around his lapel. The warmth radiating from him contrasts with the cool rain. Her heart grows wings. Fluttering, flapping, soaring.

She looks up, swallowing the nothing in her throat, to meet the brown orbs, to see how they look soaked in the rain. 

And they are magnificent.

His browns change colours, sometimes it's like moulted chocolate, sometimes caramel brown, sometimes caramel and chocolate mixed together.

Yet, always bottomless, like the deepest part of the ocean.

Right now, they are liquid gold, swirling with the rich hue of dark chocolate and moulted amber. The raindrops clinging to his lashes sparkle like jewels in the streetlight.

The rain continues to pour down, creating a cocoon over them. Piercing the veil comes a foreign voice.

"Sir, do you have any extra tyres to lend? Mine is jammed."

It startles both of them as they push away from each other, reacting like they’ve just touched something scorching hot. And then, she remembers, where she is, who she is and who he is, everything.

"Yes, I have one in the trunk," he replies, without abandoning her eyes. He racks his fingers through his rain-soaked hair. Her fingers ache to follow the same path.

Yet.

"No, no need," she says firmly, clenching her fingers into a tight ball and turns toward the driver. "You don't have to take me any further. I'll manage myself. Let me just get my purse."

"You have a very stubborn passenger, I see."

"Oh, thanks for the compliment,    Mr. Raizada, but I can't afford any of your debts."

She turns angrily to reach the car, but his hand shoots out, grabbing her wrist.

A thunderclap echoes, so does her scream.

The glass bangles shatter, digging into her skin, drawing blood. She clutches at her wrist, closing her eyes tightly to breathe through the sudden pain. Crimson dripping from the breech.

"Fuck," a crack in his calm, controlled demeanour appears before it vanishes in thin air. "Let me see."

A soft murmur.

But she draws her hand away.

"I said let me see," this time a little forceful.

"No thanks!!! Keep away from me," She snaps through gritted teeth, but it comes out like a broken yell. Tears of anger, pain, and frustration roll down her cheeks, intermingled with the rain. The night is just not ending anytime soon. She starts walking toward the car.

The rain has slowed down to a light drizzle. He tosses the car keys to the driver and commands, "Be quick."

Without uttering another word, he grabs her other wrist, careful of the bangles this time and all but drags her toward his car, which is parked behind the Uber. When they reach the passenger side, she jerks her wrist free.

He opens the car door, causing the interior light to illuminate the surroundings. "Don't talk to me like that".

Her eyes narrow, his unyielding.

He reaches out to grab her injured wrist, but she takes a step back. Yet he reaches out once more, grabbing her forearm and bringing her wrist under the light. She tries to snatch her wrist free.

The more he attempts to see her wound, the more she tries to break free. At the end of the tug-of-war, he growls, "Khushi." A warning.

That stops her.

Because she've never heard her first name falling from his lips before.

Nobody says her name like this.

His lips wrap around the word.

His rasp caresses every syllable.

She winces slightly as he inspects her wound, her delicate wrist imprisoned in his colossal fingers, a fragile bird caught in the grip of a storm. A broken shard of glass lies embedded in her skin. Without saying anything he lowers his head, his teeth grip the jagged piece and pull it out. Her heart races in her wrist, pulsing in her fingers.

A delicate whimper escapes her lips, as fragile as the flicker of lightning under the dark cloud above.

His eyes lock instantly onto hers as he spits the glass piece out. His tongue peeks out to lick his lips, tasting the crimson that lingers there.

Red paints her cheeks, spreading to her neck, down to her chest, as he cleans her wound and wraps it in fresh gauze from his glove box.

"We are ready to go, ma'am," the driver's voice floats from somewhere in this misty haze as he hands the keys back.

"I'll be there in a minute," her words split in half as she replies.

Her hazels bore into his browns. He crosses her arms. His face is empty except for a slight lift, resembling a smile, playing on his lips. She says nothing. With one last gaze, she walks away, telling herself not to look behind. And she succeeds.

When the Uber starts to move along the streets, she sees a familiar, sleek black car trailing her. Again. The same one that has been trailing her before. But this time it doesn't turn her blood cold. Her blood is lava, coursing through her veins.

The car follows her till she reaches her house. It doesn't come close. It stops half a mile from the main gate. Two guards manning the entrance look at her before they open the gate. The Uber rolls inside and she stares back till she can see no more.

Author's note: Another chapter down! Your thoughts mean everything to me, so feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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@arshifiesta @featheredclover @phuljari @jalebi-weds-bluetooth @chutkiandchotte @herelivesahobbit @shiyaravi @titaliya @msbhagirathi @arshisrabbaves @arshiradio

[0x00000010]

0x5E1F1E

i released an experimental artwork that allows the viewer to create collaborations with me in realtime and mint the resulting 1/1 artworks on tezos

it takes in your camera stream through a DOS/ASCII style filter created by 0x10 and there are some controls where you can configure colours and character sets

when you're happy with the creation you can press mint and a preview of the final artwork will be displayed. this is where you can add a title and description for the token

all minted artworks appear in the collection on objktcom and rarible and are marked as collaborations between the minter and 0x10

on-chain artworks and viewer

each artwork has a 100% on-chain ASCII version that is stored alongside the artwork on the blockchain and can be used to reconstruct the artwork without ipfs

for this we pay per byte, so there is an associated storage cost for each selfie that increases depending on the complexity of the final output - the more colours, characters, and overall noise in the scene the higher the on-chain storage costs

i created an accompanying token viewer application which is also 100% on-chain, and this came with a whole heap of problems i had to figure out in order to achieve

it can be installed via a single terminal command available inside the artwork. the same command is minted at typed.art/8280

running the command installs and optionally opens a local viewer app. this app is extremely basic because it was written from scratch, by hand, and optimised to fit inside a single tezos blockchain transaction, which also brought about a lot of limitations i had to get around to achieve this part of the artwork

technical information

the artwork consists of 6 smart contracts. 3 of them are utility contracts that do things like checking signatures, domains, and token balances, and the other 3 are the mintery, the on-chain asset storage, and the tokens themselves

when you access the site for the first time you need to request a "mint access token"

this token is an NFT that will appear in your wallet from the mintery contract, and is your key to minting selfies. it's not possible to call the minting functionality without this special access token in your wallet

you also require a tezos domain linked to the wallet. both the tezos domain and the mint access token are used to create a unique signature that gets signed and attached the each mint request and gets verified on-chain during the mint process as part of a bot-resistant proof-of-concept minting technique

fun facts

the entire artwork is to be considered a self-portrait of 0x10

the artwork is 100% web3 - there are no servers, the primary artwork site is hosted on ipfs with the dns running through the linked tezos domain page (0x5E1F1E.tez.page)

i initially created the entire artwork to use gzip compression for storing the on-chain data and then at the very end when i was writing the on-chain viewer i could not fit my gzip decompression code into a single blockchain transaction, so had to scrap and re-implement the entire engine using a basic LZW implementation instead of gzip to achieve my goal of having a self-contained transparent on-chain viewer application that fits into a single transaction

there is a super-secret glitch mode hidden inside the artwork that can lead to some pretty amazing creations - however, the complexity of the final results can lead to very expensive storage costs for the on-chain versions of glitched creations and they can even deviate slightly from the original (below example would cost over 5tz in on-chain storage alone)

there's on-chain documentation for reconstructing a selfie from the raw on-chain data

the hex representation of the red colour in the access token and logo is #5E1F1E

there is an upper max limit of 0x5E1F1E (6168350) selfies available

you may use outputs from 0x5E1F1E or even 0x5E1F1E itself as an input into new artworks provided attribution of some sort to either 0x5E1F1E or 0x10 is included with the new artwork

my versum genesis is one of my earliest glitch-mode outputs created while i was developing selfie

i had fun making this artwork, i hope you have fun using it, and i look forward to seeing more creations

[arcticdementor]

What they were looking for, if you go back in the record, was always that elusive direct genetic evidence. For decades researchers in behavioral genetics had performed kinship studies, research involving adoptees and identical twins, to determine the degree to which genes might influence behavioral traits such as intelligence, perseverance, extraversion, and more. Identical twins share more or less 100% of their DNA, with some complications, while ordinary siblings share an estimated 50% of their genetic code, with even more complications, and half-siblings share ~25%…. These estimates of genetic similarity allowed researchers to crudely match that estimated similarity with quantitative behavioral variables like IQ. Identical twins who were raised in different environments permitted a glimpse at how their nearly-identical DNA resulted in similarity under remarkably different circumstances, while the differences between adopted children and their siblings who were the biological progeny of the parents permitted similar questions through a different lens.

The findings were always the same: biological parentage, which is to say genetic parentage, was massively influential on human behavior, and consistently more influential than observable social and environmental factors like parenting. Identical twins shared remarkable similarity in all manner of variables, even when raised in profoundly different environments. By adulthood adopted children resembled their biological parents far more than their adoptive ones, and in many variables adopted siblings were found to be essentially no more similar to each other than any two random people - which, genetically, they were. There are many overviews of kinship research from completely mainstream publications that you can easily access which summarize these findings, findings that now stretch back more than a half-century.

All of this would appear to have merely lent additional credence to an entirely banal observation, which is that our genes influence absolutely every element of our selves. To assume that this included our behavioral selves would seem to me to be sensible rather than controversial. Our behavior is driven by our physiology, especially our brains, and as organs our brains are built according to the architecture described in our DNA, which passes to us from our parents and from far further back in our genealogy. Yet this simple observation about the world - that genes matter for our behavior - is not only not treated as banal but as a marker of irredeemable bigotry by many in liberal society. Even when care is taken to discuss the difference between a group genetic claim (such as genetic origins for racial or gender differences) and an individual genetic claim (the influence of parents’ genes on their progeny), any discussion of DNA and behavior is frequently greeted with extreme condemnation, especially discussion of how DNA influences academic ability.

Unsurprising, then, that the kinship studies were always subject to relentless criticism. Much of it was of the explicitly mysterian “maybe there are some things science shouldn’t investigate” flavor. But others were methodological arguments, of varying levels of seriousness - the data sets were frequently contaminated by twins who were partially reared together (a real problem), there were potential confounds from influence of the environment in utero (a semi-real problem), some claimed that parents treat twins so differently from the way they treat other children that it confounds everything (not remotely a real problem). Methodological disagreements are a ubiquitous aspect of social science; all studies have critics and all fields feature profound internal disagreements about the truth. But people with no larger interest in research methods have long been deeply invested in critiques of kinship studies, and issues that would be considered minor in most contexts are seen as damning. People have always badly wanted to find a reason to shut down this line of thinking. The most relentlessly cited complaint, and an eminently fair one, was that we just couldn’t look directly at the genome, and so we simply couldn’t make any responsible conclusions.

And then the first real genomic studies arrived. I believe this 2006 study was the big breakthrough, the first time genetic relatedness scores were successfully generated between siblings which could then be matched with degrees of similarity in different variables. And indeed those siblings which were more closely genetically related also had higher correlations in various behavioral factors, strongly suggesting a genetic influence on those variables. In the 15 years since, more and more major studies were published that sought to examine genetic influence on behavioral variables, through various specific experimental means. There were complications and early struggles, but over time they revealed such influence as techniques became more and more sophisticated. (Here, for example, is a writeup of a 2017 study from the notorious white supremacist journal The New York Times.) As Razib said, “Heritability was more than a statistical construct, it was a biophysical reality.” Perfectly mainstream scientific publications, some quite prestigious, have also discussed such research as a matter of mundane academic inquiry, rather than as somehow outside the bounds of propriety.

So this was what the critics were waiting for, right? After decades of complaints that kinship studies could not be trusted because they did not directly look at the genome, here now was research looking at hundreds of thousands of people through advanced No, of course not. The denialists barely break their stride. There was no period of adjustment, no soul-searching, no cease fire while more information was gathered. The denialists just doubled down, jerking their knees more reflexively, making their dismissals even more raw, continuing to grumble about eugenics and Nazis and Gattaca. The more evidence mounts, the more they work to exclude the case for genetic influence on behavioral traits from respectable society, rather than to critique its merits or wrestle with its implications. This is a conversation most people simply do not want to have, and in my experience, those are the conversations that prove to be the most vital and necessary in the long run.

…

And now Kathryn Paige Harden has shown up with a big-deal book and it’s been written up in one of a small handful of publications that still moves the needle.

Why does any of this matter? For a lot of reasons. In my book, I focused on a prominent one: the entire school reform movement has proceeded from the assumption that all students have equal ability to learn, that all students can be rendered into star students under the influence of quality teaching and schools. Based on this logic, hundreds of thousands of teachers have been paid more or less based on the performance of their students, thousands of teachers have been fired for failing to achieve results, and hundreds of schools have been shut down entirely. If the students under the care of these teachers and schools have profoundly different academic potentials, then all of this is an injustice. Broaden out, and the offense is even starker: the moral justification for our system is based on the notion that we more or less control our own life outcomes. The social contract depends on this notion of individual agency. If, on the other hand, our genomes deeply influence those outcomes in a way we can’t control, you’ve kicked the legs out from under the whole operation. This is why the hereditarian left is uniquely positioned to argue for a more egalitarian society: we offer a criticism of capitalism and meritocracy that disqualifies its most basic foundations, that destabilizes the entire notion of “just deserts.”

That’s why it matters. In case anyone asking why it matters is doing so in good faith.

…

The rude thing is… I just don’t believe people, on this issue. When they say that they think all people have the same innate ability to perform well in school or on other cognitive tasks, that any difference is environmental, what I think inside is, I don’t believe that you believe that. When researchers in genetics and evolution who believe that the genome influences every aspect of our physiological selves say that they don’t believe that the genome has any influence on our behavioral selves, what I think inside is, I don’t believe you. I think people feel compelled to say this stuff because the idea of intrinsic differences in academic ability offend their sense of justice, and because the social and professional consequences of appearing to believe that idea are profound. But I think everyone who ever went to school as a kid knew in their heart back then that some kids were just smarter than others, and I think most people quietly believe that now. Like I said, it’s rude. But I can’t shake it.

…

Within 50 years, perhaps within 30, rich parents will routinely pay to have children whose genomes have been manipulated or selected for higher intelligence and other attractive qualities. I do not know what specific technologies will enable this to happen, but I do know that it will happen. And when the monetary elite uses genetic science to further strengthen the unearned dynastic advantages of their progeny, locking in the privileges that they already enjoy and pass down through inheritance, DNA, and our rotten system … what will the people attacking Paige have to say about it? What arguments will they be able to muster, against genetic engineering for those who can afford it, after decades of denying that genes matter in human behavior at all? What smarmy little jokes will the liberal gene denialists tell then? Saying “eugenics” won’t ward off that future. Saying “Gattaca” won’t ward off that future. Saying “Charles Murray” won’t ward off that future. Nothing can prevent a future in which our technological capacity to manipulate the genome has ever-increasing social consequences, almost certainly very bad ones.

[shadoedseptmbr]

For Work In Progress Wednesday:

I am fooling around with a framing device for a few ME2-pre ME3 sketch fics I’ve been piling up but it’s still rough.  Wouldn’t mind a little feedback from the peanut gallery.

Case Files

Not immediately. 

Major Alenko absolutely does not run to the SPECTRE office with his new authorizations to view files he honestly has no business seeing.

The second Human SPECTRE nods and smiles and shakes hands during the small party the Council insists upon.  He does an interview with a shockingly meek Al-Jilani. He has a cup of tea with the drell, Tannor Nuara, though he’s pretty sure that’s not his name and checks in with Dr. Michel to remind her to keep him updated on the hospital’s needs.It’s no problem, he assures her. He used up enough of the resources, himself.

Kaidan goes to his quarters and changes into his fatigues and opens a beer he probably shouldn’t. He sends another message to his mother and makes a few replies to friends.  He starts in on the endless pile of paperwork.  He considers dinner, a shower, hitting the training facility. He drinks his beer.

An hour after that, he’s in the elevator, in the hallway, avoiding an ambassador’s aide.

It’s probably a violation of privacy.  It’s absolutely taking advantage of privileged information.  But he needs a few answers, if he’s ever going to sleep at night without wondering if he did the right thing.

Her file is...staggeringly long.  He scans a few others, for comparison.  His is almost nothing but his BaAt file, his service record, and the three debrief interviews he did after Alchera. After Horizon. After Earth and Mars. Others are thicker and thinner.  Saren’s is heavily redacted even with Kaidan’s authorizations and the affirmation of the Reapers and ends with “Status: Revoked. Terminated.”

Shepard’s starts with a few files from an orphanage that he just glances through, most of which are nothing but “Fostered: Date. Returned: not much later.” There’s one black and white holoscan of a little girl with tight braids, freckles, big eyes and a gap tooth grin.  It’s labeled: Eden Magdalene Shepard 

No other record found matching available data. Possible id not confirmed.

But it’s her.  He can see the woman in those clear, direct eyes.

There’s a stack of arrests for an Ace Shepard 

Possible alias. Matches available data. Records sealed for age 

And one mugshot.  Definitely Aedan Shepard, the scar under her eye still fresh and stark. Red hair, though unnaturally crayon bright, half shaved and shaggy on the other.  Those eyes lined in red, staring at the camera like murder from a pale, bone thin face. Black lipstick smeared across her sneer. One arm long and dangling, the other in a cast, strapped to her side.  A sketchy green tattoo on her neck in the side view of a knife, a slash of purple make up stark across a nose too big for her pixie face. No age listed but she can’t be 14 by the date.  

An Academy admissions form for Aedan Shepard with an accompanying note from one Commander Anderson that he skims to land on a final line. “I know she isn’t what you usually look for. She’s going to need some remedial work. Trust me on this one, Mira.”

Her Academy file shows grades gradually improving to higher marks. Her physical improves faster, doctor notes indicating that between regular meals and gene mods she’s going to make the height/weight requirement by the end of her first year. Her marksmanship punts her into the stratosphere.

Another picture in familiar Academy togs. There’s his...there’s the Shepard he knew. No visible tats, Dark red hair, short but neat. Seven freckles across her leonine nose not quite hidden by regulation makeup.  The scar is faded, but still raised. Eyes level and cool, mouth firm.  Baby professional.

He knows her service record almost as well as his own.

There’s the one holonet picture from Elysium, Aedan in her black bikini and flip flops, dogtags flying, pistol steady, directing someone (a teenage girl, she told him later) to fill a hole in the defense. There’s the picture from a little later, chin high and firm in her dress uniform: an admiral pinning the Star of Terra to her chest.  He can see Anderson leaning over to Hackett in the background.

There’s a cross reference to her N file.

Commendation after commendation. One flag for disrespect to a superior officer.

SPECTRE CANDIDATE

There’s the file on the Normandy SR1, the holo of her SPECTRE induction, and the Saren mission.

Her Alliance report on the mission, the letter to Ashley’s mother. A few interview files.

A debrief they’d called her to Arcturus to give.  She’d shrugged it off as routine and they’d run to the Citadel for shore leave.  

There’s the official Alchera report cross referenced with his. Joker’s. Chakwas’.

He slows down. There’s a termination flag that wasn’t removed.

Attached to that is an addendum from another SPECTRE, Tela Vasir, cross referenced with the Shadow Broker file three weeks after the Collector attack on the SR1.

Situation to be reviewed. Shepard and/or remains possibly recovered. Check all Cerberus contacts.

The next data is a bioscan from the security checkpoint on Zakera, two years and a few weeks after Shepard had been declared dead. An alert notice. Three grainy stills from the security chief’s office. Not quite clear enough to make out details beyond hair and height. And two figures in Cerberus gear behind her.  

He’d just left the Citadel posting for Horizon the week before. 

The next file is video only, fuzzy. Clearly from a planted device. Kaidan rubs his eyes before he hits play on grainy footage with biometric data rolling on the outside edge. 

A red haired, slender, short figure in black and red N7 armor strides into Anderson’s Citadel office.  She walks like Aedan, that rolling ship gait.  She draws up short in front of his desk.  He speaks, she answers, he speaks again.  And he watches her whole body jerk as if she’s been shot.

All formality lost, her hands spread.  She’s yelling and Anderson isn’t meeting her eyes as he replies.  That square posture droops and hers matches. 

She slaps a data drive on his desk, turns on her heel and marches to the door.  The bug must be by the doorframe, Kaidan can see details now.  She turns her head and there they are, the scars that shocked him, glowing along her jawline pulled open and raw by the awkward position. They look like they hurt. He almost misses the word she asks over her shoulder. “Kaidan?”

Anderson shakes his head and Kaidan can lip read well enough to get, “Classified.”

Her hand clenches on the doorframe. “Two years, Boss?”

“Yeah, kid.”

She jerks a nod, says something else as she turns to go. Her shoulders square before she walks through the sliding door. He catches a glimpse of white and black on a figure just outside. Anderson leans against his desk, head down.

A holo of a Normandy; the SR2. Flying Cerberus colors in the Citadel docking bay.

Biometrics confirmed. SPECTRE Status: Reinstated. 

Kaidan closes the file and staggers back to the elevator.

00000

It’s a week of small potato missions before he can trust himself to reopen the file.

Every two weeks, there’s a data dump to Anderson/Hackett, copied and crossreferenced to SPECTRE files. About half include encrypted data that still hasn’t been decoded The Alliance version carries a note dating from nine months ago: Speculation: Code specific to Anderson/Shepard.

The dumps usually come from Illium, shunted through a source with an address he recognizes.  Liara.  

There’s a pile of data from Omega and then a list of files for her crew: Miranda Lawson. Jacob Taylor. Kasumi Goto (notations from Spectre Jondam Bau). Garrus. Mordin Solus. Zaeed Misoni. Urdnot Grunt. Justicar Samara. Jack. Tali. Thane Krios. He recognizes Tannor Nuara and shuts the file down.

Over a cup of tea in the bustle of Huerta’s lobby, Thane blinks but then smiles.  “You were more observant than I expected, Spectre Alenko.”

“It wasn’t my business.”

“No.  But I promised her I would look out for you and I clearly revealed more than I intended.”

“You promised Shepard?”

He nods.  “You were still bedridden at the time. It seemed a reasonable precaution.”

Well, thanks, I guess.

“It was my privilege. She helped me save my son, once.  I was glad to return the favor with her...friend.”

“Can you.  Look, I don’t want to put you in a corner.  I’m just trying to reconcile the Shepard I knew with what happened last year.  Can you tell me...anything?”

“When I met her on Illium, I used her to distract a target.”

A target?  You were there to kill someone?  

You said you read my file?

You were an assassin.  

Yes. 

You used Shepard?

She was...a very good distraction.  My target assumed Shepard was the assassin, tearing through her guard and the tower like fire through dry tinder.  It allowed me to quietly get into position. Shepard got her information and I made my hit.

And Shepard hired you?  It wasn’t that far out of character.  Wrex came to mind.

We came to an agreement.  I was not expecting to be able to work much longer and the Cerberus contract allowed me to set aside money for my son.

Right.  How was it?  On the ship.

Antagonistic.  At first.  There was a line drawn between the Cerberus crew and Shepard.  It was crossed very rarely.  She was.  Not warm.  

Unfriendly?  

Angry.  She drank more than I expect was good for her.  She spoke rarely, to Garrus most of all.  She put her armor on in the morning and we rarely saw her in anything else.

What changed? 

We aided Tali, the quarian?  Kaidan managed not to snap that he knew her.

Yes.  We found her and Shepard made a visible effort to change, Kasumi asked a favor and they dealt with it. She came back...you’ve seen the scarring? 

Yeah.

They were almost closed.  They’d been healing, reopening, healing.  

Garrus needed her help and while we were on the Citadel, she aided me with my son.  He was...about to follow in my footsteps but without my training it was...she saved him.  She helped me stop him.  When she came back to the ship, she went up to speak with Joker and I heard her laughing.  I had not. Before.  

The drell went stiff before him, his dark eyes revealing stark pupils.  “Eyes like ice frozen on the shore, she stands between Kolyat and the ambassador.  She speaks with steady conviction and he listens.  Eyes like the storms on a sea, she shadow steps between the turian and the bullet waiting for him. “He’s as good as dead, can’t you see that.” Garrus drops his rifle.  Eyes like smoke, she laughs like rusty bells on a chain.  Joker tells her he’s missed her.”

His eyes darken to see Kaidan before him, scanning him with an omnitool about to wave over a doctor.  “Forgive me.  Drell have...our memories are revealing.  It seemed the best way to answer your question.”

“What just happened? No...nevermind.  It got better then?”

“Yes.  Until then...She was always a sniper, I assume? “ 

“Yeah, before I met her”.  

“There is a...one has to put oneself in a certain state and a healthy being can slip in and out.  She did not.  Before that.  She was just in the cold, stark place one must be in to pull the trigger.  And then, the wind changed.  It was Garrus and Tali, who made the most difference.  Kasumi mentioned once that Shepard barely spoke before he came aboard, other than mission briefs.  After.  She would visit.  It was…”  Thane broke off in a coughing fit. “Forgive me, I need to…”

“No, I kept you too long. I”m sorry.” 

Thane stood, his hand not quite clutching the chair for support. “I will...try to write down some things for you.  If you’d like.”

“Only if you’re up to it.  I got...I got the gist.  Thank you.”

[docfuture]

Princess, part 10

      [This story is a prequel, set several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16.  Links to some of my other work are here.  Updates were theoretically biweekly–more realistically, I’m going to try to get the next one out by early July.]

Previous: Part 9

      Flicker was going to lose pieces of self.  She could put memory summaries in the Database, but that wasn't enough.  She could only permanently store her emotional context in her squishy human brain, which was offline.  This constricted connections between memory, place, and time.  Her older memories should be intact.  When the isotope exchanges were complete and she could finally restart everything and heal, everything should still be there.  But that didn't help now; anything old that she didn't already have loaded into her speed mind was inaccessible, and any new context would be ephemeral--gone after her next proper sleep.       And that 'should'... wasn't a would.  Itchy spots in her speed mind hinted at losses on the boundary, reflexes and habits needed for her squishy and speed halves to work together that she might have to relearn.  Her speech synchronization problems might return, or her chronic self-interrupting.  Old sensory issues might come back, too.       Those losses might extend to memory access.  Which was a little scary.  Moments perfectly preserved in a box did her no good if she forgot where she put the box.  Perhaps because the original link to the first box was now in a junk box labeled 'Misc' on a shelf somewhere.       But that was life when she wasn't technically alive, with a heart that couldn't beat, lungs that couldn't breathe, and a whole reconstituted flesh body locked down in suspended chemical animation while the isotope exchanger worked.  Force fields helped protect everything else from her still-considerable radioactivity.  She probably wouldn't remember exactly how the half-pain, half-itching from her speed body felt, or how her claustrophobia was combining with sensory deprivation to make everything more unpleasant.  The best she could do was to take notes for the Database, which she could finally talk to again.  Slowly.       Doc had rigged up inductors to transmit visual signals that her speed mind could sense.  They could give her low res video if she slowed down to near human speed, but for anything faster she was limited to text.  She was already used to virtual typing, and there were more inductors to pick that up.  The biggest problem was lag--if she typed too fast, she had to wait and watch characters slowly appear to catch typos.  She was watching slowly updating video stills of Doc as a background while they talked by text.       It was way better than nothing.       "... too many versions of the 'alien invasion' story out," sent Doc.  "It wasn't worth trying to correct them.  The Volunteer kept his press brief honest but short and vague--he mentioned non-hostile non-humans who were injured but would recover, he just didn't say they were whales--and then flew off before anyone could ask him any more questions."       "Okay," sent Flicker.  "Can we go back a bit?  No immediate crisis is good.  But I'm still missing a lot.  It's making my mind itch.  More.  It's itching for other reasons, too, but this you can help fix."       "No problem.  What first?"       "What was the bit with Breakpoint?  He wasn't trying to warn you or me?"       "No.  I got a notification just as you started your final run.  The warning was for Journeyman, he listened, and the danger passed."       "More details, please?  Did you forward the warning?"       "I didn't need to; Journeyman was standing beside him.  That was one of the precautions I arranged before you left, and they were quite willing to help.  Journeyman had his own detection setup coordinated with the Database, and they had the attack triangulated in a fraction of a second.  And then Breakpoint got the danger sense spike, just before Journeyman wanted to port, which delayed them for a second."       "A trap?"       "Possibly.  But I think a potential time loop was more likely."       "Caused by what?"       "I don't know."       "Surely you have a theory?"       "Lots.  Theories are easy, distinguishing them is harder," sent Doc.  "Too many parameters we don't know.  But your trap did confirm the attack was based on some kind of foreknowledge--the timing was far too precise for any other explanation to make sense.  Perhaps Journeyman and Breakpoint would have caught the attacker, triggering a loop.  Or killed it, with the same result.  Or they did get caught in a loop and broke out."       "How would that even work?"       "Several possible ways.  Time loop theories are hard to falsify.  But after it was safe, they ported in and swept the arrival location for clues.  The attacker apparently came from and returned to the Topaz Realm, a common intermediate stop for interdimensional travelers who wish to evade pursuit or tracking.  The two of them declined to pursue further, and returned unhurt, though rather drained from the double port.  Journeyman went to ground quote 'somewhere safe' unquote, and Breakpoint is with Jumping Spider.  I'm sure we'll get additional details later, but the attacker was almost certainly an extradimensional being who portaled in specifically to try to assassinate you, with implications of harm to the entire planet."       "And got away.  Whee."       "An overt repeat attempt seems unlikely.  This was a clear worldwide threat, in a way Hermes was not, and now there is a specific event to track from.  The compatible world probability background has shifted by quite a bit.  There are a wide variety of entities with extraordinary perceptions and abilities that are now aware of the attacker and united in the desire for Earth to keep existing, if little else.  The Database has been getting messages from all over the world.  Hideki told me he already had to gently dissuade a group of young Japanese superhumans from charging off on an interdimensional mission of vengeance.  They vividly recall your help during the quake, and feel inclined to track down whoever tried to kill you given the slightest opportunity.  I was also asked to convey their wishes for your speedy recovery."       "That's..."       Some emotional thing.  But Flicker didn't have a working human brain to feel it, and her emulator wasn't up to the task.       "...nice."       She sent a note to the Database to relay a socially safe thank you.  Her mind still itched.       "Okay," she sent.  "Thanks for the summary.  Now... I have a problem.  Your UI works--I can talk to you and the Database.  And if the exchanger were going to be done in a couple of hours, that would be enough.  But it's going to take longer.  I can tolerate the physical part--but I'm not so sure about the psychological.  Sensory dep, and I have to keep shifting what I'm doing to maintain concentration.  I've been recording the more organized parts of my raw impressions and alerts into the Database.  But it's as tedious as hand-typing an endless stream of hex codes.  That's making my attention wander.  I've lost my spot a couple of times already and had to pattern match to find it again.  I hate to complain, but is there anything better you can manage?"       A pause, and the background picture updated to show Doc with his hands clasped in front of his face, looking somber.  Then he started typing again.       "I've been fabbing something that may help.  I'll let you know when it's ready."       The rhythm of the isotope exchanger changed slightly, the ion beams stopped, and the discomfort eased a little.  A message from the Database appeared:       "First pass complete, left leg."       "Well," sent Doc.  "Ready to start lowering the tritium load in the bone marrow of your other leg?"       "Yes.  But it doesn't really matter," she sent back.  "It's the next thing.  We need to get as much as we can done while I keep my chemistry clamped down or I don't get a livable body back."       "Yes.  We may be able to speed up later.  But at least it's working."       "Yeah..."       *****       Tedious hours passed.  Then there was a pause and shift, while radiation-hardened robots installed a new set of inductors for her head, along with an elaborate set of shielding, wiring and cooling pipes.  Flicker took an all too brief run around Doc's test range.  Even though she was still blind and deaf, the flow of air and the sudden bright crispness of her mass sense made it a welcome break.  But she made a little of that air radioactive--she was still giving off too many neutrons--so it would have been indulgence to stay outside the force fields for more than a millisecond or two.       Then tests and adjustments.  Fiddly and annoying, but Doc was determined not to set off an immune reaction from Flicker's high speed nervous system, and DASI concurred with the need for caution.       Another shift... And a world turned on.       A better interface, through a virtual body representation.  Audio, distorted but functional.  Video.  And faster text and data when Flicker sped up.  The grinding background of confinement, restlessness and inability to fully relax was still there.  As was the discomfort from the isotope exchanger.  But her sensory deprivation was greatly reduced.  It worked.       There was one rather jarring issue.       "I feel this sense of cosmic dread," she said.  "Like I'm on the edge of a precipice to dimensions I can't even see, and might at any moment slip and lose my connection to sanity, or drag anything and everything I care about into the abyss."       "Good," said Doc.  "Sounds like your alarm systems are appropriately compatible."  The wide video window showing his image floated in front of her.  The darkness around the edges was still flecked with the writhing static of closed-eye hallucinations, but they were less intrusive.       "Good?  It's not exactly--"  She blinked and suddenly everything was gone, then the old interface returned--text and a fixed picture.  And the static everywhere else.  She sped up.       "DASI?" she sent.  "What happened?"       "You blinked for too long, and the interface interpreted it as a user shutdown request.  I can adjust that, but the safety shutdown thresholds are necessarily quite stringent.  One moment."       Another blink and Doc was back, eyebrow raised.  Half a second had passed.       "--fun," she finished.       "Fun was not a design goal," said Doc.  "This is a high performance multi-sense cybernetic interface.  It's not remotely safe.  The basic sensory relays I started you with were already as high-bandwidth as I could manage safely.  But they weren't enough.  I don't know how to make a full cybernetic interface that's comfortable but not psychologically addictive.  I keep the controller in the vaults for a reason.  I fabbed spare inductors.  They'll probably break frequently.  And shut down for other reasons.  Don't get attached to the interface.  I wouldn't even consider using it if your biological brain was functional.  I put together a list of other ways it's dangerous.  It's just not as dangerous as risking sensory deprivation for what might be days."       "Okay.  But if you think the alarm system for my high speed mind is compatible with a cybernetic interface... Don't I already have one?"       Doc looked down, then back up.  "Possibly.  But you'll want to be careful how you conceptualize that.  Because right now, if your body has a cybernetic interface, you might be that interface.  So it's not a good time to shift your self image."       "Yeah, yeah, because my flesh body is dead," said Flicker.  "I get it.  My internal conceptualization has been pretty consistent.  Messed up, but consistent.  It's like a meat demon with a little metal bug on the forehead.  High speed mind is the bug.  And only the demon is dead.  The bug is mostly worried about staying sane and connected.  And I've got the connected part now, but sane requires something to do.  I can't move while the exchanger is working, can't put things in long-term memory, and my emotion emulation is bad, so my options are limited."       Doc put a hand on his chin and looked back at her image in the video window.  "Could definitely be worse.  You'll want to test the interface at speed.  DASI will keep monitoring.  Perhaps we can tune down the doom response a bit.  And Armadillo will be here in a little while.  She's rather better at cheering people up than I am.  I'm sure she'll be happy to talk about whatever you want."       "Might help a little.  But I'm not sure talking will be enough.  Sec."       Flicker sped up.  The interface speed lagged noticeably and the temperature of the inductors rose.  The temperature in her brain would have gone up too, if she hadn't already been entropy dumping to get rid of the heat from radioactive decay and the isotope exchanger.  She skimmed the hazard list.  Doc hadn't been exaggerating.  And the full interface would not be able to keep up with her mind if she sped up all the way.  The problem was cooling, which was the usual problem that stopped Doc after he'd solved everything else.       So.  Use restraint.  Don't push it all the way to the limit, and it would break less frequently.  She adjusted some preferences with DASI's help, so the interface would gradually degrade to monochrome text and virtual typing input at higher speeds.  That would give her fast responsiveness as well as the increased sensory feedback she needed when she slowed back down.  A few tests verified it worked.       At DASI's suggestion, she tried taking notes at speed with the better interface as a direct substitute for long term memory.  A slower and more structured version of the memory dumps she did before sleeping when her memory was overleveraged and she couldn't stuff everything into squishy brain in time.  With the memory dumps, she could put keys into her squishy brain to connect by reference--but not with everything locked down.       More tests.  The notes were accurate on rereading, though seemed kind of passive-aggressively gloomy.  Upon reflection, she decided that was accurate as well.       What to do?  The data from Speedtest was recorded.  Talking was... talk.  Little point in reading or trying to learn.  Introspection could become a problem fast--her mood was already pretty dark.  But she couldn't get renewal from physical rest, so she was going to slowly go squirrelly from lack of sleep and contact with squishy brain.  And she already felt the kind of frustrated dissatisfaction that she usually handled by going on patrol.  Then she might still end up frustrated, but at least she'd saved lives.  Now she couldn't even do that.       She wasn't helpless.  She still had a net connection, her database node, and assorted bots, both physical and virtual.  But what was safe to try?  She slowed back down.       "Interface works," she said.  "But the doom abyss is getting old real fast."       Doc was studying his own display intently.  He tapped out something on his keyboard then looked up.  "How's that?"       The tension eased somewhat.  "Better," she said.  "Less cosmic dread, more dangerous machinery in operation alert.  I can live with that.  But I could really use something to do."       He shook his head ruefully.  "I understand.  Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing.  But you have a very good chance of surviving your bit of existential roulette if you can manage to keep yourself together and stationary long enough for the exchanger to do its work."       She frowned.  "Is that what you call the kind of trap I set?  I thought you said we're safe now."       "No, I said further direct attacks were unlikely.  Whether that's because they wouldn't succeed or aren't necessary is still open.  We can't be reasonably certain until the next time you sleep, then wake up functional and something approximating sane."       "That's disturbing."       "Yes.  But what's done is done."       "So you don't think trying it was a good idea?"       "I'm reserving judgement.  And if you were going to try, the Moon was a better place than Earth.  You minimized direct collateral damage.  However..."  A crooked grin.  "Now probably isn't the best time for critical analysis.  Survival and data recording were the right priorities once you made it back.  We can hash out details later."       "Yeah, but it does give me something to focus on, which I need.  I think that finally getting to go fast was so wonderful, so freeing, that I got overconfident."       Doc studied her image for a moment.  "Based on my preliminary analysis of the Database summaries, I think you may be underestimating another effect.  I can explain, if you think it will help."       "Well, yeah."       "When you left the earth's atmosphere, you were hit with mental changes and a flood of alarms and activations on top of your acrophobia.  Which you coped with very well.  I think your caution, careful safety compartmentalization, and lockdown checking were absolutely correct and optimal reactions.  Having a previously unknown part of your mind wake up and suggest you mess with Planck's constant locally?  That would have terrified me.  But you handled it."       Doc waved a hand.  "That was a way more drastic reaction than I expected, and means I need to rework a lot of my theories.  Anyway, you took care of everything, and landed safely.  You jumped to the Moon.  Your landing message sounded like you were euphoric."       "I was."       "And your fear went away.  You had mass again, the alarms stopped, and you were finally getting to run Speedtest.  Of course you were feeling great.  And I made a mistake.  Before you started your final run, I suggested you go as fast as you felt safe.  I didn't include a stronger warning because I didn't want to interfere with your joy.  But I knew.  I know that feeling, it's Now I Am Invincible, it's incredibly dangerous for a superhero, and I knew the way you usually keep it in check is your care for all the people and other living things on Earth, and there was nothing living on the Moon except you."       He looked down.  "I should have warned you.  I didn't.  I'm sorry."       "Doc, no," said Flicker.  "I'd have done it anyway.  Nobody died.  I got the data.  And whoever or whatever that was, we needed to know about them, and now we do.  I'm going to keep going."       She bared her teeth.  "Even when I can't move for a while."       Doc kept looking down for a moment, then wiped his eyes and looked back up.  "Yeah.  On that note, it's time to move the exchanger focus again, and Armadillo is here.  Shall I invite her in?"       "Sure.  And thank you for--"  She waved the hand of her virtual body.  "This, and the list of reasons why it's dangerous.  Both.  They both help."       The crooked smile was back.  "I do what I can manage."

Next:  Part 11

[digimarketpro01]

ADVICE AND REMARKS ON CORPORATE SEO

Are you running a business and looking to increase your visibility? SEO appears to be one of the most common solutions on which many players are present. In this article, I give you the most basic advice and some things to think about when you want to be more present on search engines. When you have adopted a digital-oriented marketing strategy , SEO and SEA definitely appear to be great means of acquisitions. The reality is that this is not only the only advantage but we come back to that later.

Establish a corporate SEO strategy

Our many trusted SEO clients know it: To obtain results, we must set quantifiable and qualifiable objectives. Likewise, based on our experience, we define what falls within the priority objectives and secondary objectives . The great property of SEO is to mark a territory and most often to position a website in an existing market over the long term. It is up to the company to then propose the appropriate offer to the traffic obtained. The SEA has the advantage of positioning your website directly on the offers you offer; It is up to you as for us to study with great precision, in a ROIste way the conversion of such campaigns of Ads. In both cases, the preliminary study and a reflection on the marketing strategy must be put in place. For this, it is necessary to provide feedback qualifying the resulting means of action.

We have a habit (and our loyal readers know it) of breaking down SEO into several areas of study:

On-page and off-page on the one hand,

The technical part and the semantic part on the other hand.

These questions are the subject of an in-depth study in the SEO audit that we offer to small, medium and large companies that ask us. The stakes are high in many respects on SEO because it allows to establish a launching pad on social media, E-reputation, E-mailing in addition to the sales generated by the very fact of having a good site. reference.

Is the benchmark useful in corporate SEO?

The benchmark is a form of benchmarking, of comparison in a way from one company to another. In SEO and even in paid referencing, it is possible to establish elements of comparison between the different players in the same market. It is generally interesting to extract information from competing sites, including for a more global marketing strategy (Note that there are different ways of benchmarking ). But we will not hide here that there are not so many differentiation methods on the levers that are SEO and SEA. In any case, the techniques are more or less the same depending on the objective criteria that we define together. Be careful, when I mention the little singularity in corporate SEO strategies, I do not forget that we can be more or less aggressive, more or less in relation to direct request, more or less on a competitive to highly competitive sector involving reflection of a different nature. But I'll summarize the methods quite trivially:

You need a clean code for your site (and rich in elements adapted to the engines),

You need content,

You need a nice semantically distributed tree structure,

You need an internal mesh,

You need more popularity (backlinks).

This means that if it is necessary to look at the competitors, it is mainly on certain points and in particular the way in which the backlinking is done . For the rest, the logic resulting from a mind map and an annual marketing plan should be sufficient to rank better. In any case, the competitors have the same needs.

The elements of differentiation in the SEO of companies

As I mentioned just above, the elements of differentiation are more limited. However, we will notice that many companies base their strategy on elements such as storytelling or backlinking and it is there that we can have interesting margins of maneuver. These criteria, which should be analyzed, do not necessarily correspond to the approach of evaluating conversion. Evaluating conversion is not just looking at the conversion rate against the indicator in your profession; We are more inclined to talk about raw data and let me explain why: When you increase the performance of a website from the point of view of SEO, you potentially increase traffic including that from the long tail. Therefore, your traffic increases even though the market you are targeting remains relatively identical in volume.

The consequence in Google Analytics is: Increase in bounce rate and decrease in conversion rate. I wanted to remind people here that seeing your conversion rate fall on SEO but your gross value increase is not only normal, it is desirable! It's up to you and us to find the real good key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the number and quality of positions in Google for example.

You are not satisfied with this remark and I understand you. This is where another differentiator comes in: The user experience . We could even consider this point as the first to observe (many professionals do so wrongly in my opinion). User experience (UX) is the last element that improves the conversion (And there, I hope you read the above )

Beyond that, I had already expressed my opposition to having a concomitance between user satisfaction and a high bounce rate in Google Analytics on the excellent site of Olivier Duffez. No, satisfaction and further UX are elements to be taken into account from the SEO point of view from the SERP and for a company in its own processes throughout customer - employee - partner - supplier relationships. I like the notion of relational business and accomplished inbound marketing strategy . In a nutshell: Passive prospecting and loyalty are good, appropriation as business design is better.

Control your brand image through corporate referencing

Often, we are contacted for E-reputation issues . A lack of visibility is a recurring problem that also generates problems in the long term. Without customer follow-up, without cocooning your market and without an Internet presence with:

A well-referenced website,

Storytelling and demonstration of expertise,

Blogging,

Useful video on YouTube

In-depth work on social networks 

You are sure to see negative appearances whatever the level of your business in a market that demands more relationships . Centralize all your resources here and ensure that digital is the business of all your employees, it participates in the culture of the company and that is felt, transmitted, appreciated and understood. If you need a diagnosis of your e-reputation , contact us.

[escentia]

How to build an art website

My first attempt at building an art website was in 2016. Back then I didn't know how to write a single line of code. I bought a year's hosting with Bluehost, tried setting up a wordpress site, struggled, decided it wasn't worth it, and got a refund.

One and a half years later, in 2017, I taught myself how to code for a summer internship. I first learnt Python for data analysis, but soon realised that I could also learn HTML, CSS, and the rest while I was at it.

I finished the Codecademy course for website building in three days. Half a year later I tried coding my own Wordpress site. And, at the start of this year, with Wordpress completely revamping their website editor, I fled to GitHub Pages.

Currently my site (quietdistance.net) costs me 15 USD per year since I pay only for my domain name. That's a far cry from my first venture with Bluehost, which would have cost me 120 USD a year!

If you have no coding knowledge, and are interested in making a simple website, here are some steps I would suggest.

Learn some basic website coding. It's not as hard as some might think! Codecamy has a free course which holds your hand through the entire process: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/paths/learn-how-to-build-websites

Learn Git version control. There's another Codecademy course for that, and it can be completed in an hour!

Push your website onto Github. Github Desktop makes the process much simpler.

If you're serious about this art website endeavour, register a domain name and point that to your Github site. This step is entirely optional! Your website will already be accessible via its Github URL.

The entire process is free except the very last step, which costs less than 20 bucks. This is how I wished I had set up my site in the first place -- it would have saved me lots of money anxiety and frantically phoning technical support when I accidentally broke my Wordpress site!

Many artists these days make websites with Wix or Weebly. While these drag-and-drop, what-you-see-is-what-you-get website buiders are popular, I don't like them because:

You have to pay 5 USD every month to remove the website builder branding which is kinda ugly :( And that adds up to 60 USD a year!

Their code is clunky, bloated and slow.

Your creativity is limited to what editing options they offer you. Want links that flash rainbow when you hover over them? Cool transitions? Extra plugins? They're much easier to achieve with raw code.

If they revamp their site builder you'll need to check that your design still works the way you want it to. Since their site builders are constantly being worked on, you never know if an update might break your site.

And why Github is cool:

Github doesn't use your site to advertise themselves. They're run by Microsoft and have other revenue streams, so they don't resort to using your website as their billboard.

Unlimited sub-sites! In addition to your main portfolio site, you can easily make a separate site for every new creative project -- at no cost.

It loads super fast because it's used by professional geeks. My old Wordpress site took 10 seconds to load, and would sometimes not load at all. After moving to Github, everything could load in under 3 seconds.

You can test all changes on your computer before syncing it onto the online repository. No more accidental website breakages! Github Desktop records every file change, and you can undo them at will.

And why make a website at all?

If you post art to more than one platform, you'll realise that the number of likes/shares/comments is rather arbitrary, influenced by how long you've been active on the platform, your posting schedule, whether you've been featured, and other factors.

Instead of reflecting the quality of what you create, these numbers reflect how much value you are to the platform's advertising business. These two criteria can overlap, but often they don't. Yet these numbers can affect how other people perceive your work.

Your own website creates a safe space where you have control over how your work is presented to the world. Instead of conforming to platforms designed to maximise views and advertising profits, you have the power to create a place as weird and wonderful as you want.

It'll serve as a reminder that you're not just a data point, not just a cog in the wheel. That you should draw to make yourself happy, not just to please other people. That you're a precious and irreplaceable human being.

So sally forth and create! And may it bring you joy.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 28 Feb 2020

Today's links

Clearview AI's customer database leaks: Sic semper grifter.

The Internet of Anal Things: Recreating Stelarc's "Amplified Body" with an IoT butt-plug.

Oakland's vintage Space Burger/Giant Burger building needs a home! Adopt a googie today.

Fan-made reproduction of the Tower of Terror: Even has a deepfaked Serling.

Drawing the Simpsons with pure CSS: Impractical, but so impressive.

Let's Encrypt issues its billionth cert: 89% of the web is now encrypted.

AI Dungeon Master: A work in progress, for sure.

How to lie with (coronavirus) maps: Lies, damned lies, and epidemiological data-visualizations.

This day in history: 2019, 2015

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Clearview AI's customer database leaks (permalink)

Clearview is the grifty facial recognition startup that created a database by scraping social media and now offers cops secretive deals on its semi-magic, never-peer-reviewed technology. The company became notorious in January after the NYT did a deep dive into its secretive deals and its weird, Trump-adjascent ex-male-model founder.

(the Times piece was superbly researched but terribly credulous about Clearview's marketing claims)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Yesterday, Clearview warned its customers that it had been hacked and lost its customer database. Today, that customer database was published.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement

It seems that the NYT weren't the only ones to take Clearview's marketing claims at face value. Its client list includes the DoJ, ICE, Macy's, Walmart, and the NBA. All in all the dump includes more than 2,200 users, including "law enforcement agencies, companies, and individuals around the world."

Included: state AGs, university rent-a-cops, and clients in Saudi Arabia.

"BuzzFeed News authenticated the logs, which list about 2,900 institutions and include details such as the number of log-ins, the number of searches, and the date of the last search."

What does Clearview, a sercurity company, say about this ghastly security breach? "Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century."

Big shrug energy.

"Government agents should not be running our faces against a shadily assembled database of billions of our photos in secret and with no safeguards against abuse," ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, said to BuzzFeed News.

It is amazing that this needs to be said.

"More than 50 educational institutions across 24 states named in the log. Among them are two high schools."

They are:

Central Montco Technical High School in Pennsylvania

Somerset Berkley Regional High School in Massachusetts

The log also has an entry for Interpol.

The Internet of Anal Things (permalink)

In 1994, the notorious/celebrated electronic artist Stelarc did a performance called "Amplified Body" in which he "controlled robots, cameras and other instruments by tensing and releasing his muscles"

https://web.archive.org/web/20120712181429/https://v2.nl/events/amplified-body

Now, artist/critic Dani Ploeger has revisited Amplified Body with his own performance, which is very similar to Stelarc's, except all the peripherals are controlled by Ploeger tensing and releasing his anal sphincters around a smart butt-plug.

https://www.daniploeger.org/amplified-body

He calls it "B-hind" and it's a ha-ha-only-serious. The buttplug is "an anal electrode with EMG sensor for domestic treatment of faecal incontinence," and the accompanying text is a kind of art-speak parody of IoT biz-speak.

https://we-make-money-not-art.com/b-hind-celebrating-the-internet-of-anal-things

"B-hind offers a unique IoT solution to fully integrate your sphincter muscle in everyday living. The revolutionary anal electrode-powered interface system replaces conventional hand/voice-based interaction, enabling advanced digital control rooted in your body's interior. Celebrating the abject and the grotesque, ‍B‒hind facilitates simple, plug-and-play access to a holistic body experience in the age of networked society."

B-hind was produced in collaboration with V2_, the Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and In4Art.

Oakland's vintage Space Burger/Giant Burger building needs a home! (permalink)

Giant Burger was once an East Bay institution, known for its burgers and its gorgeous googie architecture.

https://localwiki.org/oakland/Giant_Burger

One of the very last Giant Burger buildings is now under threat. Though the Telegraph Ave location was rescued in 2015 and converted to a "Space Burger," it's now seeking a new home because it is in the path of the Eastline project.

https://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/02/24/space-burger-launches-in-uptown-oakland/

The Oakland Heritage Alliance is hoping someone will rescue and move the building: " Do you have an idea for a new location for this mid-century icon? Please contact info@oaklandheritage.org if you know of an appropriate lot, project, or site, preferably downtown."

(Image CC BY-SA, Our Oakland)

Fan-made reproduction of the Tower of Terror (permalink)

Orangele set out to re-create the Walt Disney World Twilight Zone Tower of Terror elevator loading zone in the entry area to their home theater. He's not only done an impressive re-make of the set, but he's also augmented it with FANTASTIC gimmicks.

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/the-tower-of-terror-theater.365747/

It's not merely that's he's created a rain, thunder and lightning effect outside the patio doors…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QMzN0v4mJQ

Nor has he merely created props like this gimmicked side table that flips over at the press of a button.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY7gQLMnbeA

He's also created HIS OWN ROD SERLING DEEPFAKE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=MIsjYJwOXSU

I kinda seriously love that he left Rod's cigarette in. The Disney version looks…uncanny.

Not shown: "exploding fuse box with simulated smoke and fire, motorized lighted elevator dial, motorized/lighted pressure gauge, video monitor playing Tower of Terror ride sequence seen through the elevator door wrap, motorized "elevator door'"

He notes, "I was once married, but now as a single person, I can do whatever I want, haha. NEVER getting married again."

Drawing the Simpsons with pure CSS (permalink)

Implementing animated Simpsons illustrations in CSS isn't the most practical web-coding demo I've seen, but it's among the most impressive. Bravo, Chris Pattle!

(not shown: the eyes animate and blink!)

https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css/

#bart .head .hair1 { top: 22px; left: 0px; width: 6px; height: 7px; -webkit-transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); }

I especially love the quick-reference buttons to see the raw CSS. It reminds me of nothing so much as the incredibly complex Logo programs I used to write on my Apple ][+ in the 1980s, drawing very complicated, vector-based sprites and glyphs.

https://github.com/pattle/simpsons-in-css/blob/master/css/bart.css

Most interesting is the way that this modular approach to graphics allows for this kind of simple, in-browser transformation.

Let's Encrypt issues its billionth cert (permalink)

When the AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein walked into EFF's offices in 2005 to reveal that his employers had ordered him to help the NSA spy on the entire internet, it was a bombshell.

https://www.eff.org/tags/mark-klein

The Snowden papers revealed the scope of the surveillance in fine and alarming detail. According to his memoir, Snowden was motivated to blow the whistle when he witnessed then-NSA Director James Clapper lie to Senator Ron Wyden about the Klein matter.

Since that day in 2005, privacy advocates have been fretting about just how EASY it was to spy on the whole internet. So much of that was down to the fact that the net wasn't encrypted by default.

This was especially keen for @EFF. After all, we made our bones by suing the NSA in the 90s and winning the right for civilians to access working cryptography (we did it by establishing that "Code is speech" for the purposes of the First Amendment).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Crypto had been legal since 1992, but by Klein's 2005 disclosures, it was still a rarity. 8 years later — at the Snowden moment — the web was STILL mostly plaintext. How could we encrypt the web to save it from mass surveillance?

So in 2014, we joined forces with Mozilla, the University of Michigan and Akamai to create Let's Encrypt, a project to give anyone and everyone free TLS certificates, the key component needed to encrypt the requests your web-server exchanges with your readers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Encrypt

Encrypting the web was an uphill climb: by 2017, Let's Encrypt had issued 100m certificates, tipping the web over so that the majority of traffic (58%) was encrypted. Today, Let's Encrypt has issued ONE BILLION certs, and 81% of pageloads use HTTPS (in the USA, it's 91%)! This is astonishing, bordering on miraculous. If this had been the situation back in 2005, there would have been no NSA mass surveillance.

Even more astonishing: there are only 11 full-timers on the Let's Encrypt team, plus a few outside contractors and part-timers. A group of people who could fit in a minibus managed to encrypt virtually the entire internet.

https://letsencrypt.org/2020/02/27/one-billion-certs.html

There are lots of reasons to factor technology (and technologists) in any plan for social change, but this illustrates one of the primary tactical considerations. "Architecture is Politics" (as Mitch Kapor said when he co-founded EFF), and the architectural choices that small groups of skilled people make can reach all the way around the world.

This kind of breathtaking power is what inspires so many people to become technologists: the force-multiplier effect of networked code can imbue your work with global salience (for good or ill). It's why we should be so glad of the burgeoning tech and ethics movement, from Tech Won't Build It to the Googler Uprising. And it's especially why we should be excited about the proliferation of open syllabi for teaching tech and ethics.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jWIrA8jHz5fYAW4h9CkUD8gKS5V98PDJDymRf8d9vKI/edit#gid=0

It's also the reason I'm so humbled and thrilled when I hear from technologists that their path into the field started with my novel Little Brother, whose message isn't "Tech is terrible," but, "This will all be so great, if we don't screw it up."

https://craphound.com/littlebrother

(and I should probably mention here that the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface, comes out in October and explicitly wrestles with the question of ethics, agency, and allyship in tech).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

AI Dungeon Master (permalink)

Since 2018, Lara martin has been using machine learning to augment the job of the Dungeon Master, with the goal of someday building a fully autonomous, robotic DM.

https://laramartin.net/

AI Dungeon Master is a blend of ML techniques and "old-fashioned rule-based features" to create a centaur DM that augments a human DM's imagination with the power of ML, natural language processing, and related techniques.

She's co-author of a new paper about the effort, "Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences" which "describes a way algorithms to use "events," consisting of a subject, verb, object, and other elements, to make a coherent narrative."

https://aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/2020GB/AAAI-AmmanabroluP.6647.pdf

The system uses training data (plots from Doctor Who, Futurama, and X-Files) to expand text-snippets into plotlines that continue the action. It's a bit of a dancing bear, though, an impressive achievement that's not quite ready for primetime ("We're nowhere close to this being a reality yet").

https://www.wired.com/story/forget-chess-real-challenge-teaching-ai-play-dandd/

This may bring to mind AI Dungeon, the viral GPT-2-generated dungeon crawler from December.

https://aidungeon.io/

As Will Knight writes, "Playing AI Dungeon often feels more like a maddening improv session than a text adventure."

Knight proposes that "AI DM" might be the next big symbolic challenge for machine learning, the 2020s equivalent to "AI Go player" or "AI chess master."

How to lie with (coronavirus) maps (permalink)

The media around the coronavirus outbreak is like a masterclass in the classic "How to Lie With Maps."

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo27400568.html

Self-described "cartonerd" Kenneth Field's prescriptions for mapmakers wanting to illustrate the spread of coronavirus is a superb read about data visualization, responsibility, and clarity.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/mapping/mapping-coronavirus-responsibly/

Both of these images are representing the same data. Look at the map and you might get the impression that coronavirus infections are at high levels across all of China's provinces. Look at the bar-chart and you'll see that it's almost entire Hubei.

Here's a proposed way to represent the same data on a map without misleading people.

Another point that jumped out: stop coloring maps in red!

"We're mapping a human health tragedy that may get way worse before it subsides. Do we really want the map to be screaming bright red? Red can connotate death, still statistically extremely rare for coronavirus."

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago Ad-hoc museums of a failing utopia: photos of Soviet shop-windows https://boingboing.net/2015/02/28/ad-hoc-museums-of-a-failing-ut.html

#5yrsago First-hand reports of torture from Homan Square, Chicago PD's "black site" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/27/chicago-abusive-confinment-homan-square

#1yrago EFF's roadmap for a 21st Century antitrust doctrine https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/antitrust-enforcement-needs-evolve-21st-century

#1yrago Yet another study shows that the most effective "anti-piracy" strategy is good products at a fair price https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kg7pv/studies-keep-showing-that-the-best-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-offer-cheaper-better-alternatives

#1yrago London's awful estate agents are cratering, warning of a "prolonged downturn" in the housing market https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47389160

#1yrago Bad security design made it easy to spy on video from Ring doorbells and insert fake video into their feeds https://web.archive.org/web/20190411195308/https://dojo.bullguard.com/dojo-by-bullguard/blog/ring/

#1yrago Amazon killed Seattle's homelessness-relief tax by threatening not to move into a massive new building, then they canceled the move anyway https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/huge-downtown-seattle-office-space-that-amazon-had-leased-is-reportedly-put-on-market/

#1yrago The "Reputation Management" industry continues to depend on forged legal documents https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190216/15544941616/pissed-consumer-exposes-new-york-luxury-car-dealers-use-bogus-notarized-letters-to-remove-critical-reviews.shtml

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Allegra of Oakland Heritage Alliance, Waxy (https://waxy.org/), We Make Money Not Art (https://we-make-money-not-art.com/), Sam Posten (https://twitter.com/Navesink), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Kottke (https://kottke.org) and Four Short Links (https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last week, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs" this week; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[uwaalfredo13-blog]

Online Video Cutter

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But, in case you've gotten different plans, we have discovered a few of the best apps obtainable, all of which will be downloaded by the app retailer on iTunes. I can't confirm this resolution 100% as a result of I deleted the original MP3 profile during my mad experimentation, however I am able to convert MP4 to Mp3 at whatever bitrate I chose. Subsequent edits to the profile don't appear to trigger problems.

[santorivers369-blog]

Merging Multiple Mp3 Recordsdata Into 1 Audiobook With Chapters

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You can make the most of this instrument to manage your audio information in several formats, like WAV, AIFF, MP2, MP3, FLAC and OGG. Merge different music recordsdata into one audio file. One of its powerful features is to merge audio recordsdata on Mac or Home windows. It is the Sweep Audio Editor online, an audio editor and stay playback software that helps plenty of music and audio codecs: MP3, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, WAV and Speex. Here's a listing of free net companies that lets you edit multimedia files (photograph, audio, and video) fast and easily online. Now, let us take a look at the features this app has to offer to edit audio and video. You may search for songs or music on your system to edit or you possibly can file audio using the built-in recorder. For an input file, the most common use for this option is to tell SoX of the encoding of a ‘raw' (‘headerless') audio file (see the examples in −b and −c above). Click on "Convert" button to merge all chosen audios together.

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Hymns (Sacred Hymns) In MIDI Files

Obtain crack for Direct MIDI to MP3 Converter 6.2.2.46 or keygen : Direct MIDI to MP3 Converter is a fast audio utility that means that you can convert MIDI recordsdata to MP3, WAV, WMA and OGG formats. A cheap program called "Digital Ear" can do a fairly respectable job of translating such recordsdata right into a single MIDI track. Unlike its competitors, Digital Ear can observe and respond to not only pitch modifications, but also quantity and brightness changes, translating those into applicable MIDI occasions (e. g. volume to MIDI Expression CC#11 or Breath Controller CC#2 Steady Controller messages, and brightness to Brightness CC#74 or Harmonic Content CC#seventy one, if I keep in mind right). The resultingMID file can, after all, be imported into Melody or Harmony Assistant, or any other MIDI-compatible program. The MP3 format is a lossy format. That signifies that an MP3 file doesn't include one hundred% of the unique audio data. As a substitute, MP3 recordsdata use perceptual coding. In other words, meaning it removes the information that your ear does not discover thereby making the file smaller. The explanation lossy formats are used over RAW is that UNCOOKED audio information are too large to journey over the internet at any great velocity. Through the use of lossy formats it enables even dial up customers to download mp3 files at a reasonable pace. UNCOOKED file formats usually require 176,000 bytes per second in comparison with a lossy format which requires 17,600. The distinction is very large and so are the obtain times. Being a big fan of audio and video modifying software program, she all the time wants to share her expertise with associates such as you. That is why she is here that will help you. Don't hesitate to ask her in case you are confused with our merchandise. Make your audio and mp3 recordsdata compatible to your iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone, PSP, PS3, Blackberry and even for midi to mp3 converter linux burning DVDs. Set the trail of output file and eventually click on Run" to start to convert MIDI to MP3. After selecting the correct profile, click on on the Browse button and select your vacation spot folder and the title of the new MP3 file that can be created. The WIDI is out there both in trial and commercial version. With trial model,n you may solely convert 10 seconds long audio whereas to do the complete conversion you need a commercial version. Audio -wav,mp3,ogg &flac codecs save an audio mixture of your mission. By default, the Grasp Mixer monitor is rendered, however you possibly can export individual Mixer tracks with the ' Cut up mixer tracks ' choice. See the word beneath on including sounds from external synthesizers and audio hardware. Reaper (Windows and Mac) is a digital audio workstation with MIDI recording and modifying potential. The 60 day free trial has no feature restrictions. midi to mp3 converter linux to MP3 Online Converter. With our Midi to Mp3 Converter chances are you'll convert Midi information to Mp3 audio on-line, just by the use of a web-based browser. Our service consists of many distinctive and advanced features not simply discovered in several providers obtainable on-line, wjich you'll want to use to good tune the audio rendition and procure the right from the conversion. As a result of the stuff for free isn't all the time that easy to search out and in my experience you can have bother finding the instruments once more for those who need them. For instance, there was this tool I used for extracting music from a sport some time back however forgot to do one of the different information that had some music in it too. Went back to search out the instrument again (as a result of I did this on a VM) and the download hyperlinks have been useless. I've achieved forgot what the device was since this was like last year.

Organize songs into playlists and play them back with Notation's built-in jukebox. Convert MIDI to MP3 - Convert your file now - online and free - this web page additionally comprises information on the MIDI and MP3 file extensions. Note: If you happen to want to all the time use offline Help, go to Edit > Preferences > File > Superior in your Cakewalk software program and choose At all times Use Offline Assist. Our Free on-line audio converter allow you to convert your audio MIDI extension file to MP3 format easy and fast simply Add your MIDI file after which select MP3 from conversion listing, after the conversion is accomplished you possibly can download the converted audio file immediately or by e mail. Drag the midi file into the software program instrument track. Channel Voice messages transmit real-time efficiency knowledge over a single channel. Examples embody "word-on" messages which contain a MIDI note quantity that specifies the be aware's pitch, a velocity worth that signifies how forcefully the be aware was performed, and the channel number; "be aware-off" messages that end a word; program change messages that change a tool's patch; and management modifications that allow adjustment of an instrument's parameters. MIDI notes are numbered from zero to 127 assigned to C-1 to G9. This corresponds to a spread of 8.175798916Hz to 12543.85395Hz (assuming equal temperament and 440Hz A4) and extends past the 88 be aware piano vary from A0 to C8.

[latashabrack1-blog]

Audio Converter, CDA To MP3 Ripper, Convert FLAC To MP3

500th Video Converter allows you to effectively perform video conversions, burn video recordsdata, extract audio tracks and extra. Step 4: Start to convert ape to mp3. For those who don't know, APE (Monkey) audio format is utilized by Home windows customers mainly. It is a free lossless audio compression format with a particularly aggressive compression algorithm. Although software is accessible for Linux, Monkey's Audio is as unpopular among the many customers of this working system. Decompression speeds of Monkey's Audio is just not too fast in comparison to different lossless audio codecs. A converter that means that you can extract audio knowledge from CDs may help you save your audio in a extra helpful format. These are a number of the high features you will see that in most of the merchandise we've reviewed. The MP3 format is a lossy format. That signifies that an MP3 file doesn't contain 100% of the unique audio information. As a substitute, MP3 files use perceptual coding. 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Boxoft wav to mp3 converter is an all-in-one software for changing most sorts of audio recordsdata to excessive-high quality mp3 format. The classes it may presumably convert include APE, FLAC, MP3, ape to mp3 converter free mac WMA, OGG, TTA and so on. 2. On the progress window of APE to MP3 Converter, chances are you'll pick what the laptop must do after the conversion. The default setting is to Do nothing Click on Close on the progress window, and you will return back to the first program. Strive the "Free Mp3 Vma Converter" by Koyote Soft. It additionally works with APE, AAC and OGG. Change is our favourite audio converter software, and www.audio-transcoder.com it is also available as a cellular app for Android units. It's appropriate with greater than forty input and output file sorts and has a batch conversion feature that runs within the background while you use other apps. It permits you to preview tracks before you change them, and all the music tags are preserved within the conversion course of. I happen to have several dozens of APE recordsdata, I wonder the best way to perform a mass-conversion of all my APE information into FLAC information. APE , also called Monkey's Audio, is a free lossless audio compression format together with theape file extension created by Matthew T. Ashland in 2000. It's a highly competitive compression algorithm extensively used by Windows users principally. In contract to any lossy audio file like MP3 , OGG, WMA in addition to ACC, APE would not lose knowledge data throughout the encoding course of and therefore, it may well create digital audio files that faithfully reproduce the original sound supply during playback. Convert music recordsdata to the common MP3 format for your PC, Mac, cell phone, tablet, or any MP3 player. Get MP3 sound of top of the range, up to 320 KBps. The output MP3 songs will likely be compatible with any gadget: iPhone, iPad, Zune, Samsung Galaxy, Nokia, HTC Need, SanDisk Sansa, Walkman, Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Ape To Mp3 Converter Free Mac and so on. Freemake Audio Converter helps several widespread audio codecs and is extraordinarily straightforward to make use of. However, it only supports audio recordsdata that are shorter than three minutes.

Essentially the most evident and necessary distinction between free and for-pay software program is speed of conversion. During testing, Freemake, the perfect free audio converter software program, took 4 instances so long as the quickest program, Change, to transform a 625MB WAV file to MP3. The other free converter we examined, File ZigZag , is a web-based converter device that was 30 instances slower than Swap at converting our take a look at file. It additionally limits you to at least one file over 180MB per day and 2GB or smaller files. If you might want to incessantly convert files or numerous files without delay, we advocate spending between $20 and $30 on a program that doesn't crash typically and might batch convert multiple recordsdata without delay.Nothing! Obtain Magic APE to MP3 Converter from official sites totally free utilizing Further information about license you'll be able to found on owners sites. Navigate to theape files you wish to convert tomp3 and select them. Click Open. Specifically, the flacon PPA furnishes the mac package deal (Monkey's Audio Console), on which flacon relies upon, which has the mac CLI tool, which seems to be the main missing ingredient. You'll be able to add audio information of just about any format, for example MP3, M4A, WAV, OGG. When you add a video file, the Joiner will extract audio monitor from it. The variety of tracks you can add is unlimited.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Their Hero Academia, Chapter 14

Continuing my string of new viewpoint characters, we have Sora Iida!  This is the raw, unedited version, and will eventually be cleaned up a bit when it goes up on FF.net and Ao3. Chapters 0-12 can be found here

The unedited chapter 13 can be found here

Their Hero Academia – Chapter 14: Sora Iida Takes Off

“For the record,” Sora shouted after Kenta Sato and Kimiko Ojiro, “being unable to access the Wi-Fi does not constitute a “science emergency!”  I am not your tech support!”

Honestly!  All Ojiro had done was turn the Wi-Fi functionality off on her phone.  Hardly a science emergency and definitely not worth the urgency with which she and Sato had demanded that she come with them.  In fact, there was no reason why she should have had to leave the room in the first place.

Clearly, something was going on.  Shenanigans were afoot! But what?  With all respect to the two of them as her friends and future Heroes, neither Sato nor Ojiro were clever enough to be the primary suspect in anything.  But they were usually to be found in the company of Takuma Sero, who possessed the rather unique ability to be rather clever and rather stupid at the same time when it came to getting into trouble.   Perhaps he had spearheaded something while the other two distracted her?  But what? And why would they not distract her younger brother as well?

These were questions that she clearly was going to get no answer to until she had additional data. On the other hand, she had multiple projects of her own to work on and there had been no sign of any damage to anything.  Perhaps she was better off ignoring it, so long as they did not cause any apparent disruptions?  It would mean a return to the designs she and Tensei were working on.

Yes, perhaps that was best.

Sora returned to the Common Room to find Tensei sitting at the table she had left him, looking up with the kind of grin that was usually reserved for a very serious breakthrough in design, one with only a very small number of explosions and minimal property damage.

“Brother?” she asked, tilting her head slightly.  “Did something happen while I was gone?  Did you figure out how to reduce the thrust multiplier to a manageable size?”

He continued staring ahead for a moment, though from the look in his eyes, she could tell his thoughts were moving quite rapidly.  Their mother got the same look fairly often and from what their father had said, so did she.  According to Father, the only trick to bringing one of them out of it was a sudden shock.

“Oh, younger brother,” she trilled.

That brought Tensei to attention, his eyes focusing on her.  “While that is factually correct, it is only a matter of minutes!  The data is statistically irrelevant under most circumstance!”

She offered him a somewhat apologetic nod.   He was easy to get riled up.  Not quite as easy as Father, but few people were.   Their mother could do it with just a slight change of expression.   “It was necessary.  You were quite clearly lost in thought and I did not wish to wait for you to come out of it on your own.”

“I was not…” Tensei trailed off, starting to stand.  Halfway though, he sat back down.  “Forgive me, Sister,” he said.  “I was indeed lost in thought.  Much has occurred since you left the room and I am still uncertain of how to process it all.”

“Elaborate,” she said. “Did Sero do something?  He was not with his usual collaborators.”

“It was Sero,” Tensei told her.  “He wished to thank me for saving his life earlier.”

That was perfectly logical, but it did not make sense with the deception.  “Commendable,” she said.  “But that does not explain why Ojiro and Sato felt the need to remove me from the room before he did.”

Tensei smiled again. “There was more.  He asked if I wished to engage in a one-on-one activity with him this weekend.  I accepted.”

“Oh, well then, that is…”

Wait.

She stopped and replayed the words he had just said in her mind. “Are you telling me, you have a date?”

More information assembled itself in her brain.  “With Sero?”

Tensei nodded.  “I do.”

“I am very happy for you, Brother,” Sora said.

She realized it was the first lie she had ever told him.

***

“Kirishima-Bakugo!” Sora shouted, arms flailing through the air as she entered Kirishima-Bakugo’s room. “I require advice!”

Kirishima-Bakugo looked up from her chair, where she was lifting small weights.  She gave Sora a long, penetrating stare.  Perhaps it was meant to be some form of communication?  Was it code?  She could crack that if she applied enough thought.

Somehow dissatisfied with Sora’s response, Kirishima-Bakugo finally spoke.  “…And you’re coming to me, why, exactly?  Isn’t this more Tokoyami’s bag?  Or Toshi?  Or Izzy? Besides, I thought you usually talked things through that brother of yours.”

Sora frowned. “Unfortunately, this concerns my brother, so I am unable to request his advice on the matter.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you came to me.  We ain’t exactly best friends or anything.  …And it’s not like I’m exactly known for making the best decisions.”

“Those are true statements,” Sora admitted.  “But Tokoyami, Todoroki, and Toshi are occupied with their study group with Shinso and Haimawari.  I did not wish to interrupt.  I know we are not close, but I would appreciate council all the same.”

Kirishima-Bakugo finally set down her weight.  “This have anything to do with your brother getting a date with Sero?”

Sora felt her eyes go wide. “How do you know that?  I only just learned moments ago!”

The blonde, muscular girl laughed at that.  “You do remember Ojiro was involved, right?  Once she knew it, assume everyone who exists, did exist, and will exist knows.”

She picked up her phone and called up a post from a social media site.  It showed a picture of a happy if somewhat shell-shocked Sero with the caption “My BFF (@Takuma_Sero) just scored himself a date with Tensei Iida! I’m so proud of him!  And Iida is such a hottie!  So jealous!”

Sora stared at it for a moment.  “That was fast.”

“So what’s up?” Kirishima-Bakugo asked.  “Just don’t tell me you were crushing on Sero.  Because that would have really been barking up the wrong tree.”

She shook her head. They had all known Sero was gay for some time; he made no secret of it.  She had known Tensei was as well, of course, though she was uncertain how many of the others did.  He did not really speak of romantic or lustful inclinations one way or the other. Like her, machines and intellectual challenges were typically his first priority.

“No, nothing like that. It is just…”  Sora trailed off, waving her hands in the air in awkward gestures.

“I’m gonna need words, Jetset.  My Quirk ain’t mind reading.”

Strange.  She could usually articulate her ideas quite clearly. Or at least, clearly enough that her brother and mother could understand.  Other people sometimes did have a hard time following her.  But words were not usually a problem.

She tried again.  “Tensei and I are twins.”

Kirishima-Bakugo raised an eyebrow.  “And water is wet.”

“It is just… I should be happy for him.  It is good that he has found someone to spend time with, someone he might like.  But for some reason, I am not.”

For a long moment, Kirishima-Bakugo stared at her again.  Then, a strange, amused grin finally crossed her face.  “I always wondered what would happen when one of you left the nest.”

She stood and rubbed Sora’s hair vigorously.  “You’re jealous, Jetset.”

Sora pulled back, running a hand over her blue-black hair to smooth it back down.  “I am sorry, but… what?”

Kirishima-Bakugo flopped back in her chair, still grinning.  “You,” she said, “are jealous. That someone who’s not you is getting to spend time with your brother.”

“No, that cannot be it,” Sora said, looking down.  And yet… The data point introduced by Kirishima-Bakugo completely recontextualized the data points she had already gathered about the situation.  Her reluctance to be happy about the situation, a nagging concern in the back of her mind that she could not name…

“We have always done everything together,” she went on.  “We have the same Quirk, we have the same interests, we understand each other well enough that we can practically read the other’s thoughts.  I cannot remember a time we have every spent more than a few hours apart.”

“You do know they’re not getting married or nothing, right?  This might not even work out.”

She was aware of that, wasn’t she?  And it was not realistic to expect that her brother spend his every second with her. He already did not do that; they had to sleep sometimes, after all.  Not at much as most people would probably prefer they do, but that was an argument for another time.  But they typically did spend the majority of their waking hours together.  Two minds and four hands made for lighter, smarter work, after all.

Sora was a woman of science. She had been taught from a young age to hypothesize, experiment, analyze the data, and come to a conclusion, even if the results were not the ones you wanted.  The walls of their home had several scorch marks that attested to that.

She became aware of Kirishima-Bakugo snapping her fingers in her face.  “You went away there for a little while, Jetset.”

“I am sorry,” Sora said. “But I think, Kirishima-Bakugo, you are right.”

“Say that again.”

“’You are right’?”

She grinned.  “I just wanted one of you eggheads to admit that for once.”

Kirishima-Bakugo went on, “Look.  My own personal life’s kind of a mess right now.  And I really ain’t the person with answers.  But the way I see it, being a little jealous ain’t terrible.  Letting it take over, letting it get in the way of you and your brother, that’d be terrible.  I know I’d hate it if I let something come between Tai and me.”

Sora nodded.  Her jealousy was an understandable factor. But one she could control.  There was no reason to deny her brother a chance at some happiness.  She would hope he would do the same for her.

“I…   Thank you,” she said.  “You have given me a lot to think about.”

Kirishima-Bakugo nodded. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who can use their head.  ‘sides... Just think of how he might feel when you find some guy to ask out.  Or girl.  Or whoever.  If that’s your thing.”

“Oh,” she said, “I suppose that would be rather hypocritical of me.  Especially as I like…”

Kirishima-Bakugo held up both hands.  “Nope, don’t wanna know.  I got enough going on without getting you even more sorted out.  I already know more about you than I needed to.”

“Still,” Sora said, “I must thank you.  This was a very clarifying discussion.”   She held up her arms, awkwardly.  “Social convention tells me I should hug you now.”

“…Let’s skip that, okay?”

***

When Sora went to find her brother, he was not in his room.  Thankfully, Shinso knew where he was and told her that he was on the roof.   She first went down to the Common Room to grab bottles of grape and apple juice from the fridge, then went up to join him.

Tensei was standing near the edge of the roof, looking up at the stars.    “Brother?” she asked.  “Are you nervous about your date? It is soon?  Where are you going?   I demand additional information!”

He turned and smiled, accepting the bottle of apple juice that she offered him, taking a long swig before he answered.  “I am filled with uncertainty. This is my first date ever and I feel incredibly unprepared.  But Sero has suggested this Saturday and going for a quick dinner and to the arcade downtown.  He seems experienced enough in these matters, so I agreed with his plans.”

She took a drink of her own apple juice.  “If I could offer you advice, I would,” she said, “but my dating experiences are no different than your own.”

“Do you suppose I should ask Father for advice?”

Sora shook her head. “I think we both know that would useless.  Mother always says that she had to get Aunt Mina and Aunt Toru to explain her interest in him to him before he understood.  Though he claims they were overly direct about it.”

This got a laugh out of him. “This is true.  Though I am uncertain as to what they could have said to fluster him so.”

Sora shrugged.  “I am afraid I have no idea.”

She frowned.  The two of them had always been open and honest with each other.  Now was not time to change that.  Even if her opinion on the situation had changed, he deserved to know her full thoughts on the matter.

Tensei noticed.  “You seem preoccupied, Sister.”

She finished her juice before she spoke, feeling it fueling her body and her Quirk.   It was a warmth, spreading through the rest of her, concentrating itself in the jet engines on her back.  “I told you I was happy for you when you told me you had a date. And I am, now.  But when I told you that, I was lying.”

His eyes widened. “You were?  But why?”

“I was jealous,” she said. “I was afraid if you were spending time with Sero, we would have less time together.  And I realize that this is still true.  But that does not make it wrong.  We are twins and always will be.  But that does not mean we cannot have our own lives as well.”

“As if I could ever forget about you,” Tensei said.  “You are my sister.  I will always try to make time for you.  But I am also inexperienced in the requirements of other relationships.  So if I fail to achieve balance, I will be relying upon you to set things right.”

She nodded.  “Of course I will. Can you forgive me my jealousy?”

“Of course!”

“And,” Sora said, “you will do the same for me, should I ever pursue a romantic relationship?”

“Certainly,” he said. “Though as your brother, I am obliged to threaten any boy you might be interested in with bodily harm, should he be anything less than a gentleman to you.”

“And as your older sibling, I should remind you that the responsibilities of protecting the younger sibling from their romantic partner falls to me.  Perhaps I should be pre-emptively defending your honor with Sero with threats of violence!”

“You are older by only three minutes!  That is a statistical rounding error!”

“Nevertheless, it is still factual and precise!”

“I am not having this argument again!”

“Because you are losing!”

“I do not concede that!”

“The facts do not care about whether or not you accept them, they simply are!”

Tensei gave her a curious look, as he put data points together.  “For the sake of being prepared to defend your honor, is there anyone you have romantic interest in?”

He always shifted topics when he knew her logic had defeated him.  Well, she had already nearly told one person tonight, perhaps she ought to tell someone for real…

“Both of you go inside! It’s after curfew!”

Sora peered over the edge of the roof, spotting Aizawa down on the ground, patrolling the school grounds.

“How does he do that?” Tensei asked.  “His vision should not be that good.”

Sora shook her head.  “If I have learned anything so far this week, it is that Mister Aizawa is a statistically anomaly all his own.”

***

Sora returned Tensei to his room and was on her way back to hers when she saw Toshi coming from the stairwell.  Mostly likely, he had finished his study session with Tokoyami, Todoroki, and the rest. Even in his casual wear, his muscles were readily apparent.

“Oh, hey, Sora,” he said.  “How’re you taking being lab-banned?”

She frowned.  “It is going,” she said.  “A week is a long time to be away from the Support Workshop.”

“Well, you did kind of blow it up…”

“Only a little!  We put the fires out very quickly!”

Toshi put up his hands in an apologetic gesture.  “Okay, okay, just a little exploding.  I’m sure it was fine.”  

“It was,” Sora insisted.  “But Power Loader did not see it that way.  After he was done banning us, I saw him break into the bottle he keeps in his desk for “emergencies.”  Whatever that might be.”

Toshi blinked slowly for a moment, looking at though he might say something about that, then shrugged.  “Well, I’m sure it will pass pretty quick.  We’ve got plenty of Hero stuff to keep us busy.   We’re going out to the USJ next week, after all..  Uncle Kota says he’s got some really special stuff planned!”

“That is good,” she replied.  Though she was not completely without worry about it.  They all knew what had happened during their parents’ first visit to the USJ.  While they all knew the likelihood of anything like that happening to them was amazingly slim.  The various members of the League of Villains were either dead or in prison. Nevertheless between who they were and what else was going on in the world, the school was taking a great number of precautious.

He nodded.  “Yeah, I’m really excited for it.”

Indeed, she could see the excitement already in his green eyes.  It was an aesthetically pleasing look on him, especially when he smiled.  

“It promises to be an interesting experience,” she agreed.  “Though I am not as certain as to how well I will perform at rescue work.  I can certainly catch falling people, as my brother did for Sero earlier today, but much of it requires more delicate work than my Quirk allows.”

“That was a good catch,” Toshi agreed.  “But don’t sell yourself short either.  The right Quirk in the right place at the right time can make a big difference, sure.  But you and your brother are way more than just flying around.   You’re both crazy smart.  That’s important too.”

Sora felt her cheeks redden slightly.  “You are too kind, Toshi,” she said.

“Yeah, well,” he said, rubbing the back of his hair, messing up his green hair. “It’s true.”

“Thank you,” she said again.  Perhaps there were better words here.  But she still felt as though the time was not quite right.   Not when she was still battling down the last vestiges of jealousy. “I will keep that in mind.”

He smiled again.  “Good,” he said.  “See you in the morning then?”

She nodded.  “In the morning.  Good night, Toshi.”

“Good night, Sora.”

She headed back to the stairwell to head back to her own room.  She definitely required further data points before proceeding.   Perhaps she could interrogate Tokoyami or Todoroki for more information before she put a plan of action into effect…

[wolfliving]

On the subject of Making

From: Garnet Hertz

I made a Google Form to collect ideas in regards to an organization to fill the gap left after Make threw in the towel and closed their doors. The full responses are included below. At this point, it looks like something will be organized for sure... or at least I'll be starting up something. Thanks to Mitch Altman, Karen Marcelo and members of Nettime for sharing. There are piles of good ideas here: which of these do you think are the most important?

Here are the raw, unedited responses to the question "If you were running an open source maker-oriented organization that filled the gap left by Maker Media ceasing operations, how would you run it and what would you focus on?"

76 responses:

• Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it can be geared around smaller regional Faires

• I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are people from all over the world representing. Not only so US focused.

• Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible far from western culture...let say the gambiara creative movement in LATAM (brazil) or Cuban style repair culture guerilla, community envisioned and run publications/workshops/happenings without the 'red tape' so often discussed as part of the Maker Media legacy. so, no forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps a shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or fundraising requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the community, and much less of a focus on attracting, and then satisfying, corporate sponsors.

• Should be about critical making, open source, skill sharing, critical thinking and more...

• I think the most important thing is to help local people meet up with each other in person. This should go far beyond people who already go to a hackerspace - this is something that Make did well by bringing together all sorts of people from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc. I don't think this has to be large scale.

• Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for women; women-only days; focus on understanding biases built into technologies and imagining ways around this (critical technical practice)

• Money. Without money you can’t go far

• Projects how tos. Wait. That's Instructables. Never mind.

• cats, and i'd not run it... i would do unconferences, get space, and allow people, provide limited scheduling facilities.

• Support groups with least access to money, education, and resources to setup, lead, and run such an entity.

• I would focus on local groups with local, f2f contacts and a (funding-)mechanism to facilitate the exchange of primarily people as visiting makers instead data-platforming and global marketing.

• A mostly decentralised movement that prioritises shared ideas over branding, focusing on providing easy-access models for small, local communities to start shared spaces and hold events.

• I'd make an organisation of organisations, and invite contributions from different organisations. If I was making a publication, I think I'd go with an interview format and I'd interview two or more organisations at once - inviting them to discuss their operations, their experiences and their hopes, together.

• Ideally, a new organization would be a resource, and not an organization. I think open-source maker communities are singular to the their local communities and their local interests. A global community that allowed the specificity of local/regional interests to shine is more important to me than an 'engineered' (imposed?) idea of maker-dom. I enjoyed the broad definition of making that Maker Media cast, but I think the organization was actually dominated by specific technologies and approaches to technology. I'd like to see an organization that could get past that.

• I would focus on positive technology that attempts to help us instead of just consumer goods

• Community building by featuring projects by makers through events and publications.

• I'm not sure if it needs a replacement, aren't the maker faires run independently? Also a printed magazine isn't something that many technology interested people buy in 2019. A website that collects nice projects and tutorials would be enough.

• Education of kids. the best energy seemed to be in helping people learn

• On content by the community (electronic media) and events

• I would run it as a collective that will use their power to make an impact in society. Use the power of us, humans to make our home planet better. I would focus on philosophy and ideas, since ideas are bulletproof and no one can’t take them away.

• n my market no matter the name of a brand, people do not come because the brand comes to create community

• Non-profit, volunteer-based, brutally and radically self-sustaining.

• a bit like hackaday but with a broader focus

• Celebrating and sharing builds.

• I currently part of a maker oriented NGO in Mexico, and our experience is that there are a lot of oportunities to fund and create open content. We get funds from bigger organizations like USAID, Save theCHildren and others to fund open programs like meteorito.io or robolution,mx, that anyone who speak spanish can use.

• Sustainability is challenge. What happened to Maker Media will happen again if you are a single entity trying to make ends meet. I would rather take a different approach. More about it below.

• I would still run it as a media and marketing company. Similar to how many makerspaces stay funded by offering production, design and development services utilizing their existing resources to for-profit companies. By providing some form of value-added business in a tangential indistry separate from the niche maker media was filling, (I know, you had the magazine, but magazines aren't big money makers these days. I'm thinking of something like a peer-to-peer lending platform that allows makerspaces and small businesses to fund expansion or a marketing and development support agency and platform that sells a specific set of services or products. ) that then turns around and uses it's profits to fund the sort of programs Maker Media was running. Does it suck to end up spending 80% of your time designing a UX system for a loan platform instead of planning maker faires? Yep. But a separate business organization that just has a charter to provide funding for a maker-centric organization out of it's profits can survive a bad turn a lot easier than the two being the same organization.

• Reach out to schools and do lots of mini fairies and training to get kids ready for the faire...

• Youth and education. If you inspire the next generation you guarantee longevity.

• I would not take VC. I would make an education and technology outreach non profit. I would make it just an events company, focussing on a few big, profitable events in a year in less expensive locations plus smaller community events. It doesn't have to make a killing, just enough to make ends meet.

• I am always more interested in seeing what strange things individuals make instead of groups.

• alternative energy

• I'd focus on reaching kids who don't have a ton of money, and teaching them how to get started on a shoestring in the world of making. Stop with satellite design and get into how to use openscad, how to tune a budget printer, things like that. Maybe teach people how to bring this stuff into schools and get started there. Maybe showcase some kids programming stuff each issue.

• Exclusive: Magazine, limited pre-release hardware, baubles. Growth: YouTube

• As a non profit.

• Focus on education to the widest audience. Not sure of the best model for running.

• A shared interest organization like Foundation or Cooperation on regional based clusters. Focus should be on life long learning and sharing resources and knowledge.

• Not For Profit - Focus on inclusion and education of the core making skills that are developed through designing, building and coding.

• coop, not too pricy, but not free

• Accessible workshops and showcases of diverse creators.

• Event organization to have people meeting all together

• A web/editorial site, with a modest branching off to video. I would not do the maker fairies and events because I am not good at event planning. But I would TOTALLY love to go to some more maker faires as both an attendee, and a presenter

• Building projects together as a group.

• I would run it with the goal of educating and providing tools to communities regarding electronics and maker skills

• Non-profit. Non-exclusive. Encouraging. Run by a team who think deeply about the impacts of their actions and go to great lengths to learn both in their areas of personal interest and in areas that are for the good of the global community.

• Non-profit with a benevolent dictator. Org holds the brand, collects grants, and gives out money city by city to recognize what people are already doing. The org would also certify maker educational content and products as a revenue stream through an open access review process, similar to academic journal reviewing. That said, primary focus would be on building awareness.

• Online daily content(curating from sources worldwide), long term brand partnership, spotlight on the makers themselves, low on staff- use local partners for all events

• how to run an organization is a question for an online poll?, I don't know even how to cook

• i would focus on keeping on supporting the community

• Creativity, diversity, inclusivity

• I run a Bangalore based social business by the name of "Makespace and Open Source Creativity" (www.bangaloremakepsace.org) and we are fully sustainable and have been operating successfully for the last 5 years. We gain revenues by hosting and conducting workshops for the local maker community as well as organize multiple events where the maker community can come together, collaborate in real time, and create connections to start their own "maker ventures". We focus on the "social business" model so it avoids incurring massive debts and costs. Everything is volunteer driven.

• The way it was run isn't a problem. It wasn't a leadership issue,it was a lack of sponsorship.The big tech companies didn't care anymore. Perhaps big events should be nixed in exchange for small local maker faire events.

• Let the healthy events operate themselves. Create a minimalist amount of requirements.

• Forming a non-profit board would be the first step. I personally like consensus-based models like the Circle Way with traditional models like Parlimentary procedure used as needed. I think major focus should be placed on education (NOT just for kids!), supporting novel technologies and models especially when it comes to sustainability, and providing access to the tools, skills and mindsets behind making to diverse communities.

• I subscribed to their magazine once and while I found it interesting, everything seemed a bit advanced and over my head. It would help if they had some material for beginners.

• Make it a playground open for all

• I imagine that organization embedded inside individual educational institutions and organisation. That way it becomes financially sustainable and viable.

• It'd continue to run and focus on education.

• Too tough to answe succinctly , maker faire

• Community is the critical component, and events like Maker Faire have been amazing places to visit that help keep the community active and contributing even when remote.

• Critical social maker issues.... improving urban environments, developing countries, citizen infrastructure solutions

• I would operate with advocacy and accessibility in mind. I would focus on how the maker movement can provide opportunity and equity to people underserved by institutionally-oriented models of production, research and business. I would look for opportunities not only to generate and platform content to this end, but also to find synergy with peers and indies. I would seek to publish quality instructional material, and also journalism on the maker community. I think a guiding principle should be elevating the maker movement's reach and relevancy in local economies.

• If i were? I think, I am

• I believe that Maker Faire actually had difficulty in getting makers to register over time because of bad feelings due to the fact that the business model was for-profit but MF gave no equity to the makers, who are literally the reason for the event. I would hope that such a future organization would be not-for-profit. In the long term, maybe it could even sponsor makers with projects of enormous scope.

• An open source franchise model with a common virtual platform to share "how-to", technical help forums, show and tell, etc. This should be supported with low member fee. Also needed are blueprints on how to have a brick and morter makerspace connecting into the franchise model.

• Would change the name, like Tech or DIY meetups.

• Membership based, maybe with organizational members (like hackerspaces) • 501c3, The community

• My favorite part of Maker Media was the Maker Faires.

• Considering the raise of streaming platforms as YouTube, I would focus on keep doing content and publish or online, keeping the already big community around Maker media.

• Kids first, then hobbyists

• Stop trying to claim the word "Make" as IP and focus on enabling and building the community through faires, meetups, clubs, forums, talks, etc. Give makers a place to go to meet each other, and an audience for their works. Don't promote "maker tax" businesses, but show how DIY can be cheap enough for everybody. Less STEM, less kids, more technical.

• I would run it as a distributed co-op, focussing on sustainability and radical change.

• I'd focus on highlighting the work of underrepresented folks from the start. Without conscious effort, it's easy to show a fairly homogeneous subset of the community.

These are the raw/unedited responses for the question "If you had to pick only one thing for an open source maker-oriented organization to focus on, what would it be?"

• Community

• Smaller annual festivals (east bay maker Faire is a good size) organizing small gatherings so makers can meet makers

• check out OPEN BIDOUILLE CAMP

• maximising the good maker/craft engagements already happening on the grassroots level, rather than taking credit for them.

• Curating

• Small local events for people to show their projects and meet each other.

• Feminism

• Anything and Everything - once the money part of the game is taken care of. Without money, there is no chance to make

• Project how tos. Ugh.

• cats

• For making to focus on local need.

• I would focus on facilitating small-to-medium group ownership of open source projects as common-pool resources.

• Increasing diversity of the maker community by lowering the barrier to entry (financially, geographically, socially).

• Sustainability & Engagement. Yes, I know it looks like two things, but it's not. By this I don't just mean environmental sustainability, I also mean economic and social sustainability: Who's engaged? How is that broadened over time? And how does the organisation sustain itself? In many cases, the answer to "How does the organisation sustain itself?" will lead, by implication, to answering the question "Who is engaged?". (eg: A fablab that's in the orbit of a university will tend only to engage students! eg2: A glossy magazine about the "maker lifestyle" will tend only to engage middle class makers.)

• empowerment

• Teaching self sufficiency

• Ensuring at least one big event was happening annually to get makers together showing their projects.

• Accumulate interesting and useful projects, ideas etc.

• Helping kids create

• Events

• The idea that we can hack the planet for good

• in the community and not in the brands

• Facilitating cooperation, since this is the main thing that individual/independent makers lack in comparison to larger (corporate) structures.

• tutorials

• Celebrating and sharing builds

• Content creation

• Education and Outreach, I think the Make magazine and books were a great enablers.

• By far, I would pair down to just operating a online news site and the maker faires. I'd look at how Cracked brought itself back from the dead as an example.

• Tools to train kids to put on makerfaires

• Support the demonstrating makers

• Outreach focussed events - big ones and community ones. • These events have *enormous* impact on human beings and can make money.

• alternative energy

• Education and levelling the playground socially. This stuff doesn't have to be stupid expensive.

• YouTube

• Events

• Continue the magazine at all costs. It is the source of inspiration for many of all ages.

• Free physical and virtual spaces for learning and creation for all.

• STEAM focused. Especially for school aged children

• micro circuts

• accessible workshops and online materials

• free as in beer

• Community. I don't know how to foster that and not make it all about the money. It's hard because people make cool things and they want to get paid but "community" and "ceaseless self promotion " do not go well together

• Picking some project, and building it as a group with looking at the different elements of engineering, social science and acceptance, and presenting it to a different audience.

• Electrical engineering

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion of varied experience, culture, ideas, and methods.

• Right to repair to build more awareness around making

• Daily online content, but I think going diverse is safer

• I think I would like to focus in providing opportunities for makers that want to teach to teach, for example, I would love to teach programming for free, but havent found the space to do so

• community

• Community. Hands-down. There are many ways to address "Community" but it's the one thing I would pick over other characteristics like "Profit", "Longevity" or "Infrastructure" with respect to an open source maker-oriented organization

• Keep it small, nimble. Cater to the creativity of children, and keep it family friendly.

• Being not for profit.

• Providing access to the tools, skills and mindsets behind making to diverse communities.

• Wow, is that possible? :). I guess Arduino since you can do so many things with it.

• Let neither startup hype/pitch competition people nor social justice/identity politics people grab control over the space.

• Education and accessible technology for all

• Education

• Maker faire

• Community-organized events like Maker Faire I think are the one thing that allowed Maker Media to stand out

• critical approaches to design

• It is hard to pick one answer. I think there are several compelling opportunities for maker organizations focused on specific domains. One would be presenting maker skills in the context of a path to the trades. Another focus would be modernizing (and miniaturizing) common manufacturing processes outside the usual footprint of CNC technologies. I also believe there are a lot of opportunities for makers in agriculture and primary productivity - this is my own personal focus right now.

• Decentralization

• Whimsy. Maker businesses are fine, but there's nothing like the exhibits that elicit pure joy, which are made just because they can be made.

• Access to affordable maker spaces.

• Electronics DIY

• Regional events! Maker Faire Detroit has been so important for connecting makers in the midwest to each other and the rest of the country.

• Community building

• Events -- getting Makers together to talk, teach/share skills, show off their stuff.

• Creaste short videos that detect an issue in a community that could be somehow solved making some artifact, explain the creation process and show the impact it made.

• Physical computing

• Creating user controlled and built technological devices.

• Sustainability!! Many people are already afraid of the future, without knowing what they can do to improve matters. Be a beacon of hope. But also, as things move forward, there will be a lot of demand for this type of solutions. Renewable energy, repurposing/upcycling, interesting ways to produce food, and more. • social capacity building

Lastly, here are responses to the question "Any other thoughts or ideas?" (I've edited out some people's private contact information here, other than that these are the raw responses). Which ones resonate with you?

• the main ideas should realy come from the third world....they are way much more advance

• happy to get involved in helping build this - just let me know :) @c------- / k--.b---------@gmail.com

• b-- here. I think the zine, + on demand + downloadable format would be great. Riso !!!

• Thanks Garnet!

• Maybe a how to magazine of critical and speculative design projects?

• well... another metaphor for cats is academia, or herding cats. other • For the organisation to be a meeting space for other locally focused groups not necessarily attached to making to encourage cross fertilisation of ideas.

• "Makers" are people, and community is people -- and we should eschew the platforming tendencies by single individuals, be it TechShop, Fab Lab, Maker Media, P2P, ecology ...

• And as I said earlier, together with m------:

"Shared Machine Shops are not new

Fab Labs are not about technology.

Sharing is not happening. Hackerspaces are not open. Technology is not neutral. Hackerspaces are not solving problems. Fab Labs are not the seeds of a revolution." (http://peerproduction.net/iss…/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/) P---- T------, p.-------@--.nl

• Great thoughts and ideas on Nettime. Keep up the good work! Hope to see you again IRL some time. J----

• No DARPA grants

• Open source is a strange thing to focus on. There are many maker companies that eschew open source, and many that require retention of copyright, etc. I wonder why you chose this phrasing.

• Be political neutral, don't force political opinions on people like the left wing Make magazine did.

• I am not sure I am right. This is just my gut reaction.

• Being a “maker” is a way of living based that we can hack everything for better :) we can be better, we have to.

• The maker movement is more alive and latent than ever.

• A post Maker Media organization should imho be membership-based, with membership revenue being the basis of what is possible financially. It would be a kind of global trade organization for makers of all kinds.

• HACK OTHER EVENTS: Attend events that attract makers who don't identify as makers: comicon (almost everyone is a maker there), wood and metalworking trade shows, custom car and bike shows, etc. We grow our community by joining other communities and infecting them with our enthusiasm for blending the disciplines into one big community of makers.

• I think building an alliance or consortium that brings together various organizations and individual is much better idea. The group could consist of organizations who's business is cater to maker community (open hardware companies, open source companies).

• I think the problem you're always going to run into is an issue of that the maker community has always struggled a bit with the idea of business as a part of the movement. At its core, the movement is a hobby to most people, so the vast majority of maker organizations have to or prefer to rely on outside sources of support because if you try to fund a makerspace internally and make business an integral part of it, it just becomes another factory workshop. I don't think it works if the organization funding it is the same one as the organization trying to coordinate the non-profit programs.

• Kinda like a national science faire but more maker oriented.

• S----- H--- is severely underrated and print is dead.

• MF, by it's very nature sort of made it hard for individuals to show stuff because it was just too exhausting. I would like to see a better way to do show and tell among individuals.

• this really sucks!!!!

• We don't need so much focus on Bay Area-type artists. We need to teach people, and especially kids, how to get started for themselves, and then help them develop skills.

• Support the independent makers. They are the "talent".

• For years heard many smaller maker companies lamenting that it was too expensive to participate in a maker Faire. It was a of once a maker made the leap from maker to a maker business Make Media wanted large sums of money to have a booth/representation at an event. This amount was unproportionally large compared to the revenue the business generated. And it all makes sense why the prices were so high when there were venture capitalists that needed to see returns. Treat it the new "Make" as a company of one, then it'll succeed long term. https://ofone.co/ (no, not affiliated with the book in any way)

• Makers are strongly connected to the UN SDG's - find ways to mutual development.

• Co-create strong independent networks, portals, platforms to survive autonomy in times of crises: Signal, Protonmail, etc

• Developing of the next generation of Makers should be something that should span more than just print and digital media. Deeper integration into schools, K12 and Collegiate, to help develop the skills needed to live and work in an Internet connected, coded world.

• do not try to be too big

• I've taken the time to carve out more space in my life to make things now that Make is gone. It felt like they had a handle on the whole making things deal. And that level of fit and finish isn't really my style. I feel like I have more space to just be me and do what I want. I know this is all in my head. I really want the books to continue under a similar imprint. It'd be a shame if they were all discontinued or sold to some soulless corporation.

• More drones!

• Women are makers, and “women’s crafts” are forms of making. People living in poverty are makers, and survival invention in developing nations is a form of making. Learn from Bauhaus’s eff-ups a century ago. Learn from innovation in literal ghettos and tenements.

• "making" is too broad to go mainstream. Folks that grok makerfaire dig it hard, yet folks that don't have no clue what the hell it is. We have a big awareness problem still. Rally around right to repair and teaching folks how to fix stuff so they start taking more stuff apart and questioning how it works.

• If I had the means to start I'd do it myself

• I am sorry to waste your time

• usually monetery and community focussed efforts conflict. it would be great if this was not the case

• Occasional events are better for outreach whereas regular meetups are better for cultivating a specialism

• Consider expanding the Maker Media empire, or whatever is left of it, to the Eastern Hemisphere/East -- India and China are the future, and if Make: had some of its outposts in these economies, radical change could be seen with respect to the global maker movement

• Nothing good lasts forever. Design the business accordingly.

• I attended probably 75% of the NYC MFs, including 2010. I believe the year things changed for the worse was when Barnes&Noble got involved, makers started complaining about the cost to exhibit, and weird unrelated large sponsors showed up (some kind of new soda). The reprap festivals might be a better way to go?

• I think it makes sense at this point to look at how we can form a network of small groups in many places working together towards a common mission with the support of a board providing guidance.

• How, and with whom, can I accomplish this in Reutlingen, Willi Betz Gelände?

• I know people are super sad about MAKE. Me too. It's very nostalgic considering all the friends and community we have made all around the world. But I feel, this is just the passing of an industry from the early stage to a mature stage. This is very similar to all the open source hardware grassroots clubs we had such as the famous Homebrew Club, but today people hardly build computers by hand anymore. We have "matured" into another level of technology.

• It's a cycle. What starts young, will one day become matured and even die off to give birth to something else totally new, while the remnants of the old will get embedded as part of bigger and more financially stable organisations.

• connect up all loal hackerspaces in a city and have them run an event in a conglomeration.

• One thing I feel is lacking in the usual maker pedagogy is fundamental business literacy. People can develop amazing skills through self-study, but business law is arcane by design. 

• I think most makers stand to benefit greatly from some content demystifying business licensing, home accounting and independent consultancy work. There are already many organizations promoting independent business, but there seems to be little overlap between these and the maker community.

• The maker faire is a decentralized thing. Most of regional and mini maker faires are on. Perhaps instead of maker Media licenses we could just use a respected and recognized chapter, a document stating what is a maker faire and what is not. If the maker faire trademark will not be available for us, then we will have to think up and to agree on a new name.

• We can do better than Maker Faire.

• If there is a open source franchise model then each location could have a contributed fee that would assist with purchasing of new equipment, insurance, repairs, staffing etc. • It is a lower-cost way of sharing resources instead of having to rely solely on local volunteers or individual sites.

• Half focus on newcomers and other half in veterans. A lot of us started with Arduino, and some made custom PCB, wich is kinda normal.

• Not for profit please :D

• Get youtubers involved, like Simone Giertz, Laura Kampf, Mark Rober,

• Be an actual maker movement, about DIY and tech learning and FUN!, and not a profit-focused startup company. Be genuinely excited about making, not fake excited about selling us marked up crap. Get into the deep dive details. 

• Be more like the 8/16 bit computer user group days, the Radio and Electronics days, the glee of building and fixing and modding shit. Be photocopied zine days and not glossy magazine days. More crazy tinkerers, less TED talk. Don't be a fucking TED talk. Never be that again.

• Scrappy and inclusive, not hipster and exclusive. Geezers and kids and adults and teens all treated with respect. 

• For god's sake, the project is the star! Fuck "influencers". Nobody is a fucking star of makerdom. 

• Engineering is modest, good hacks get kudos. No hate for n00bs. Everybody can come. You can do the thing!

• Make did an amazing job of combining different disciplines into one community. I'd love to see that again.

• stress anti-capitalist and regenerative capitalist models

If you'd like to input ideas, here's the form - 

https://forms.gle/SB7FxpJVAyhVwnLp7 

- and in reference to Nettime, I'm particularly interested in hearing people (by email) that might be interested in hosting some sort of events that have to do with DIY/art/tech/culture, sort of in the spirit of a revived Dorkbot - please give me a shout.

Thanks! Garnet

See More from Molly Hankwitz

-- Dr. Garnet Hertz Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts Emily Carr University of Art and Design 520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada  V5T 0H2

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[srasamua]

Using Python to recover SEO site traffic (Part three)

When you incorporate machine learning techniques to speed up SEO recovery, the results can be amazing.

This is the third and last installment from our series on using Python to speed SEO traffic recovery. In part one, I explained how our unique approach, that we call “winners vs losers” helps us quickly narrow down the pages losing traffic to find the main reason for the drop. In part two, we improved on our initial approach to manually group pages using regular expressions, which is very useful when you have sites with thousands or millions of pages, which is typically the case with ecommerce sites. In part three, we will learn something really exciting. We will learn to automatically group pages using machine learning.

As mentioned before, you can find the code used in part one, two and three in this Google Colab notebook.

Let’s get started.

URL matching vs content matching

When we grouped pages manually in part two, we benefited from the fact the URLs groups had clear patterns (collections, products, and the others) but it is often the case where there are no patterns in the URL. For example, Yahoo Stores’ sites use a flat URL structure with no directory paths. Our manual approach wouldn’t work in this case.

Fortunately, it is possible to group pages by their contents because most page templates have different content structures. They serve different user needs, so that needs to be the case.

How can we organize pages by their content? We can use DOM element selectors for this. We will specifically use XPaths.

For example, I can use the presence of a big product image to know the page is a product detail page. I can grab the product image address in the document (its XPath) by right-clicking on it in Chrome and choosing “Inspect,” then right-clicking to copy the XPath.

We can identify other page groups by finding page elements that are unique to them. However, note that while this would allow us to group Yahoo Store-type sites, it would still be a manual process to create the groups.

A scientist’s bottom-up approach

In order to group pages automatically, we need to use a statistical approach. In other words, we need to find patterns in the data that we can use to cluster similar pages together because they share similar statistics. This is a perfect problem for machine learning algorithms.

BloomReach, a digital experience platform vendor, shared their machine learning solution to this problem. To summarize it, they first manually selected cleaned features from the HTML tags like class IDs, CSS style sheet names, and the others. Then, they automatically grouped pages based on the presence and variability of these features. In their tests, they achieved around 90% accuracy, which is pretty good.

When you give problems like this to scientists and engineers with no domain expertise, they will generally come up with complicated, bottom-up solutions. The scientist will say, “Here is the data I have, let me try different computer science ideas I know until I find a good solution.”

One of the reasons I advocate practitioners learn programming is that you can start solving problems using your domain expertise and find shortcuts like the one I will share next.

Hamlet’s observation and a simpler solution

For most ecommerce sites, most page templates include images (and input elements), and those generally change in quantity and size.

I decided to test the quantity and size of images, and the number of input elements as my features set. We were able to achieve 97.5% accuracy in our tests. This is a much simpler and effective approach for this specific problem. All of this is possible because I didn’t start with the data I could access, but with a simpler domain-level observation.

I am not trying to say my approach is superior, as they have tested theirs in millions of pages and I’ve only tested this on a few thousand. My point is that as a practitioner you should learn this stuff so you can contribute your own expertise and creativity.

Now let’s get to the fun part and get to code some machine learning code in Python!

Collecting training data

We need training data to build a model. This training data needs to come pre-labeled with “correct” answers so that the model can learn from the correct answers and make its own predictions on unseen data.

In our case, as discussed above, we’ll use our intuition that most product pages have one or more large images on the page, and most category type pages have many smaller images on the page.

What’s more, product pages typically have more form elements than category pages (for filling in quantity, color, and more).

Unfortunately, crawling a web page for this data requires knowledge of web browser automation, and image manipulation, which are outside the scope of this post. Feel free to study this GitHub gist we put together to learn more.

Here we load the raw data already collected.

Feature engineering

Each row of the form_counts data frame above corresponds to a single URL and provides a count of both form elements, and input elements contained on that page.

Meanwhile, in the img_counts data frame, each row corresponds to a single image from a particular page. Each image has an associated file size, height, and width. Pages are more than likely to have multiple images on each page, and so there are many rows corresponding to each URL.

It is often the case that HTML documents don’t include explicit image dimensions. We are using a little trick to compensate for this. We are capturing the size of the image files, which would be proportional to the multiplication of the width and the length of the images.

We want our image counts and image file sizes to be treated as categorical features, not numerical ones. When a numerical feature, say new visitors, increases it generally implies improvement, but we don’t want bigger images to imply improvement. A common technique to do this is called one-hot encoding.

Most site pages can have an arbitrary number of images. We are going to further process our dataset by bucketing images into 50 groups. This technique is called “binning”.

Here is what our processed data set looks like.

Adding ground truth labels

As we already have correct labels from our manual regex approach, we can use them to create the correct labels to feed the model.

We also need to split our dataset randomly into a training set and a test set. This allows us to train the machine learning model on one set of data, and test it on another set that it’s never seen before. We do this to prevent our model from simply “memorizing” the training data and doing terribly on new, unseen data. You can check it out at the link given below:

Model training and grid search

Finally, the good stuff!

All the steps above, the data collection and preparation, are generally the hardest part to code. The machine learning code is generally quite simple.

We’re using the well-known Scikitlearn python library to train a number of popular models using a bunch of standard hyperparameters (settings for fine-tuning a model). Scikitlearn will run through all of them to find the best one, we simply need to feed in the X variables (our feature engineering parameters above) and the Y variables (the correct labels) to each model, and perform the .fit() function and voila!

Evaluating performance

After running the grid search, we find our winning model to be the Linear SVM (0.974) and Logistic regression (0.968) coming at a close second. Even with such high accuracy, a machine learning model will make mistakes. If it doesn’t make any mistakes, then there is definitely something wrong with the code.

In order to understand where the model performs best and worst, we will use another useful machine learning tool, the confusion matrix.

When looking at a confusion matrix, focus on the diagonal squares. The counts there are correct predictions and the counts outside are failures. In the confusion matrix above we can quickly see that the model does really well-labeling products, but terribly labeling pages that are not product or categories. Intuitively, we can assume that such pages would not have consistent image usage.

Here is the code to put together the confusion matrix:

Finally, here is the code to plot the model evaluation:

Resources to learn more

You might be thinking that this is a lot of work to just tell page groups, and you are right!

Mirko Obkircher commented in my article for part two that there is a much simpler approach, which is to have your client set up a Google Analytics data layer with the page group type. Very smart recommendation, Mirko!

I am using this example for illustration purposes. What if the issue requires a deeper exploratory investigation? If you already started the analysis using Python, your creativity and knowledge are the only limits.

If you want to jump onto the machine learning bandwagon, here are some resources I recommend to learn more:

Attend a Pydata event I got motivated to learn data science after attending the event they host in New York.

Hands-On Introduction To Scikit-learn (sklearn)

Scikit Learn Cheat Sheet

Efficiently Searching Optimal Tuning Parameters

If you are starting from scratch and want to learn fast, I’ve heard good things about Data Camp.

Got any tips or queries? Share it in the comments.

Hamlet Batista is the CEO and founder of RankSense, an agile SEO platform for online retailers and manufacturers. He can be found on Twitter @hamletbatista.

The post Using Python to recover SEO site traffic (Part three) appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/17/using-python-to-recover-seo-site-traffic-part-three/