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christianbale121 · 7 months ago

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The Impact of AI Product Marketing on Customer Lifetime Value

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized how businesses engage with their customers, and one of its most profound impacts is on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV refers to the total revenue a business can expect from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship. AI product marketing enhances CLV by providing businesses with tools to better understand, engage, and retain customers. By analyzing customer data, predicting behaviors, and delivering personalized experiences, AI helps businesses maximize the value they derive from each customer over time.

Personalization at Scale: The Key to Building Customer Loyalty

One of the most significant ways AI influences CLV is through personalization. AI systems can analyze vast amounts of customer data, including purchase history, browsing behavior, and even social media interactions, to create tailored marketing strategies. For example, e-commerce brands can use AI to recommend products based on a customer’s past purchases, increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases. Personalized content, such as targeted emails or advertisements, enhances the customer experience and makes interactions feel more relevant and valuable.

Personalized recommendations don’t just drive sales—they help build long-term relationships. When customers feel understood and receive offers that align with their needs, they are more likely to stay loyal to the brand. In fact, according to a study by Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer personalized experiences. As these relationships deepen, businesses experience higher retention rates, which directly contribute to increased CLV.

Predictive Analytics: Anticipating Customer Needs

AI's predictive capabilities also play a significant role in enhancing CLV. By leveraging predictive analytics, businesses can forecast future customer behaviors based on historical data. AI algorithms analyze trends, such as purchase patterns and seasonal shifts, to predict which customers are likely to make a purchase or which ones are at risk of churn.

For instance, if AI predicts that a customer is likely to stop engaging with the brand, businesses can take proactive measures, such as sending a targeted offer or re-engaging the customer through personalized content. This ability to predict and address customer behavior before it happens is crucial for maximizing CLV. By maintaining customer engagement and preventing churn, businesses ensure that customers stay loyal and continue to generate revenue over the long term.

Optimizing the Customer Journey

AI also enables businesses to optimize the entire customer journey, which is critical for improving CLV. Traditional marketing methods often rely on segmented, broad approaches that may not address individual customer needs. However, with AI, businesses can track the customer's journey across multiple touchpoints—from the first interaction with an ad to post-purchase interactions— and deliver the most relevant content at each stage.

For example, AI can identify when a customer is in the consideration phase and provide them with content such as product reviews, case studies, or demos. When a customer is close to making a purchase, AI can offer special discounts or bundle deals. After the purchase, AI can help with post-purchase engagement, such as follow-up emails, personalized product recommendations, or loyalty program invitations. By ensuring customers have a seamless, relevant experience at every step of the journey, businesses can significantly boost CLV.

AI-Driven Customer Support: Enhancing Retention and Satisfaction

In addition to personalization and predictive analytics, AI-powered customer support can have a huge impact on CLV. AI tools, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, provide immediate responses to customer inquiries, addressing issues quickly and efficiently. This level of support enhances the customer experience by offering 24/7 service and reducing wait times, which in turn improves customer satisfaction.

For example, Zendesk and Intercom use AI to assist businesses in providing faster, more efficient customer service. AI-driven tools can resolve common issues automatically, while more complex problems are escalated to human agents. This not only improves customer retention but also frees up human agents to focus on high-priority tasks, improving overall operational efficiency.

Furthermore, AI can assist in predicting customer needs. For example, AI can suggest solutions based on previous interactions or proactively offer support before a problem escalates. By resolving issues quickly and making customers feel valued, businesses increase the likelihood that customers will continue purchasing and engaging with the brand, leading to improved CLV.

The Long-Term Benefits: Increasing CLV Through AI

The long-term benefits of AI in product marketing for CLV enhancement are immense. By improving personalization, predicting customer behaviors, optimizing journeys, and enhancing support, businesses can drive continuous engagement and sales from existing customers. Over time, these strategies compound, creating a loyal customer base that generates higher revenue and reduces the cost of customer acquisition.

Additionally, AI allows businesses to continuously refine their marketing strategies by analyzing customer feedback and engagement metrics. This iterative process ensures that marketing efforts are always aligned with customer expectations and that businesses can maintain competitive advantage.

Conclusion: Embracing AI to Maximize Customer Lifetime Value

In conclusion, AI product marketing has a profound impact on Customer Lifetime Value. By leveraging AI for personalization, predictive analytics, journey optimization, and customer support, businesses can enhance customer engagement and loyalty, resulting in increased retention rates and higher revenue per customer. In an increasingly competitive market, the ability to predict behaviors, tailor experiences, and engage customers effectively is more critical than ever. As businesses continue to integrate AI into their marketing strategies, they will find that the return on investment in AI-driven customer relationships far outweighs the initial cost, paving the way for sustainable growth and success in the long run.

#ai product marketing #ai #ai development

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charvireportprime · 2 years ago

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Loyalty Management Software Market Size, Type, segmentation, growth and forecast 2023-2030

Loyalty Management Software Market

The Loyalty Management Software Market is expected to grow from USD 3.70 Billion in 2022 to USD 10.30 Billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 15.80% during the forecast period.

Get the Sample Report: https://www.reportprime.com/enquiry/sample-report/11168

Loyalty Management Software Market Size

Loyalty Management Software is a type of software designed to enhance customer or employee loyalty, retention, and engagement. This software segment is classified based on the type, application, region, and market players. The market segment based on type includes customer loyalty, employee retention, and channel loyalty. The application segment includes BFSI, travel and hospitality, consumer goods and retail, and other industries. The market players in this segment of the market include Loyalty Ventures, Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, Kognitiv Corporation (Aimia), SAP SE, Brierley+Partners, Epsilon, Fidelity Information Services, Kobie Marketing, Bond Brand Loyalty, ICF International, Tibco Software, and Comarch. The Loyalty Management Software market is profoundly influenced by the regulatory and legal factors specific to market conditions. For example, data protection laws, government restrictions, and legal and regulatory compliance are different for different regions and can impact the Loyalty Management Software market in various ways.

Loyalty Management Software Market Key Player

Loyalty Ventures

Oracle Corporation

IBM Corporation

Kognitiv Corporation (Aimia)

SAP SE

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Loyalty Management Software Market Segment Analysis

The loyalty management software market has been gaining significant traction in recent years due to the growing demand for customer loyalty programs in various industries, including retail, hospitality, banking, and travel. The target market for loyalty management software includes large enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, and startups. Large enterprises are the major end-users of loyalty management software, which provides them with a comprehensive solution to manage their customer loyalty programs efficiently.

The major factors driving the revenue growth of the loyalty management software market include the increasing adoption of digitalization, the rising demand for customer retention strategies, and the need for personalized customer engagement. Furthermore, the adoption of cloud-based solutions and the increasing integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning in loyalty management software are anticipated to drive the market growth in the coming years.

The latest trends in the loyalty management software market include the integration of loyalty programs with social media platforms, the use of mobile apps for customer engagement, and the incorporation of blockchain technology for secure customer data management. The major challenges faced by the market include the high initial investment cost, lack of awareness about the benefits of customer loyalty programs, and the increasing competition among market players.

According to the report's main findings, the loyalty management software market is expected to witness significant growth in the coming years, driven by the increasing adoption of digitalization and the rising demand for personalized customer engagement. Furthermore, the report recommends that market players focus on implementing loyalty programs that offer customers real-time rewards and incentives to improve customer retention and loyalty. The report also suggests that market players should invest in research and development to integrate innovative technologies such as blockchain and AI into their software solutions to enhance the security and functionality of their offerings.

This report covers impact on COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine wars in detail.

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Market Segmentation (by Application):

BFSI

Travel & Hospitality

Consumer goods & Retail

Other

Information is sourced from www.reportprime.com

#buisiness #market growth #market research #market strategy #marketing analytics

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reportprimerahul · 2 years ago

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Loyalty Management Software Market Size, Type, segmentation, growth and forecast 2023-2030

Loyalty Management Software Market

The Loyalty Management Software Market is expected to grow from USD 3.70 Billion in 2022 to USD 10.30 Billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 15.80% during the forecast period.

Get the Sample Report: https://www.reportprime.com/enquiry/sample-report/11168

Loyalty Management Software Market Size

Loyalty Management Software Market Key Player

Loyalty Ventures

Oracle Corporation

IBM Corporation

Kognitiv Corporation (Aimia)

SAP SE

Buy Now & Get Exclusive Discount on this https://www.reportprime.com/enquiry/request-discount/11168

Loyalty Management Software Market Segment Analysis

This report covers impact on COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine wars in detail.

Purchase This Report: https://www.reportprime.com/checkout?id=11168&price=3590

Market Segmentation (by Application):

BFSI

Travel & Hospitality

Consumer goods & Retail

Other

Information is sourced from www.reportprime.com

#business #market growth #market strategy #market research #marketing analytics

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rubykgrant · 2 years ago

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-Also, important to imagine; even though they're in a very serious situation, they are HAPPY. As they continue to work together and help everybody, they see that they are winning, and they are each in their element, it's everything that Epsilon working with the memories was but MORE, because this is everybody together (and even though he's not literally projecting a representation of himself, Epsilon is part of all the others now), this is the first time it has ever truly been like this (because the Fragments were taken from Alpha and Beta was kept away). Theta's trust is well deserved, Delta's logic is proven right, Sigma's creativity and ambition feels satisfied, Omega's rage is justified, Gary's "deceit" feels the ultimate amusing irony of truth, Eta and Iota's fear and joy is balanced enough to motivate rather than sabotage, Tex is protecting other without resisting any help offered so she WON'T fail... and Church knows exactly who he was, who he is, and who he will be; a highly unique and sophisticated Artificial Intelligence program, a mother f*cking ghost who is too stubborn to stay dead, and a guy who has the chance to be with EVERYBODY he ever cared again again. They're happy~

Ugh. Can't draw it out, but it is FILLING up my brain, so try to picture this visual-

-In my scenario, after Epsilon Deconstructed, the information from his memories was transferred back to the original "dead" AI Units, thus reactivating them. The others all return and find each other, but Alpha has been stuck in his unit, unsure if everything that happened to him was "real". Tex gathers up the other AI to track him down, and after reuniting with the Reds and Blues, they actually FIND HIM!

-The reunion is in the middle of a chaotic struggle though; the people who have been hiding the Alpha Unit are also trying to kill all of Church's friends. There's a moment of hesitation once he's free... because, he hasn't really been "Alpha" for a long time. However, he now has memories of what Epsilon could do, and he knows what they're all capable of

-So, Church, the "original" (for all that means), is now the little pale-blue virtual computer dude who scans the area, finds the problems, figures out who needs help with what, and gives the other AI directions on what to do (lots of fun moments with the AI interacting with everybody; Theta and Caboose just VIBE, Omega tells Doc and O'Malley he's impressed by how scary they can be, and Sigma looks into Simmons' head and goes "Oh dang. I could fix him, but I won't. Whatever is wrong with him is AWESOME")

-At some point, there is too much going on, it is splitting Church's focus, and he's not sure what to do... so he calls the AI back over to him, so they can communicate together at bullet-speed rather than real-time; all the different holographic avatars merge to one point, and the avatar of Church changes from blue to white, like the ORIGINAL Alpha, like all the colors of a rainbow being combined back together in a prism. This is what they almost were before, what they could have been. The echos of their voices first sound like many different opinions and ideas, a few arguing, some uncertain, but as they talk it helps them solve the problems, they slowly start to come to the same conclusions and make a plan on their next move. When they separate again, it isn't being "divided", they are multiplied~

#red vs blue #ai fragments

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aces-to-apples · 7 years ago

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“Hit the deck!” They all—sans Caboose—manage to drop down just before a blinding flash erupts from the beam. Epsilon’s sensors are as thoroughly scrambled as Carolina’s sight, but the sounds of combat manage to filter through. When they recover, it’s to catch the tail-end of a four-on-one fight between the space pirates and someone in blue and white armor who executes a technically flawless spinning heel kick to the last pirate standing. Blinking, Carolina is the first to recover from the unexpected rescue, and her paranoid Freelancer instincts kick in almost immediately. “Who are you,” she demands, stepping to the front of the group and leveling her battle rifle at center-mass. On a spectrum of light invisible to the human eye, the twins circle excitedly around the figure as they carefully holster their—pistols, maybe?—and spread their hands non-threateningly. “Senior Commander Rex of the Five-Hundred-and-First Legion,” the soldier replies—male, confident, vaguely Australian—while at the same time as Caboose gasps, “Captain Rex!”

excerpt from chapter two of “Haat Verd”, also known as the Starvb fic that was promised

#red vs. blue #star wars #the clone wars #rvb fic #sw fic #by apples #artificial intelligence program epsilon #captain rex #agent carolina

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marketresearch-articles · 4 years ago

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Loyalty Management Market business growth report, market size analysis to 2028

Loyalty Management Market: Surge in the adoption of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, growing focus on the management of customer experience and rising development of retail and e-commerce markets are the major factors attributable to the growth of the loyalty management market. Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the loyalty management market will exhibit a CAGR of 17.75% for the forecast period of 2021-2028.

loyalty management market report provides the segmentation of the global market based on technology, application, product, and region. Each segment is explained through a chapter, which has been worded with careful thought to the ever-changing market dynamics. This market research report also includes a chapter on companies, which includes their profiles. This chapter details the progress made by the companies so far and their expansion plans for the near future. The report performs a thorough analysis of the potential of the market in the present and the prospects from various angles.

This loyalty management market report studies market risk, market overview, and market opportunities. It also evaluates the leading manufacturers of the green technology and sustainability market which consists of its revenue, sales, and price of the products. The report displays the competitive nature among key manufacturers, with market share, revenue, and sales. Furthermore, it presents the global market by region, market share, and revenue and sales for the projected period. loyalty management market report also evaluates the market by segments, by countries, and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regions.

Download Exclusive Sample Copy of the loyalty management market

Report to understand the structure of the complete Study Including Full TOC, Table & Figures @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-loyalty-management-market

The first advantage mentioned was that client loyalty programs reward loyalty to their regular customers. Another advantage was that it offers a business the simplest way to differentiate itself from competitors. The disadvantages of client loyalty programs are the program expenses which they're not a replacement thought.

Request for TOC @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=global-loyalty-management-market

The major players covered in the loyalty management report are Kognitiv Corporation., Comarch SA, Epsilon Data Management, LLC., ICF International Inc., Brierley, BOND BRAND LOYALTY INC., Ketchup Loyalty Marketing, Kobie, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO Software Inc., IBM, AIMIA Inc., Bond Brand Loyalty Inc., MICROSTRATEGY INCORPORATED., among other domestic and global players. Market share data is available for global, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South America separately. DBMR analysts understand competitive strengths and provide competitive analysis for each competitor separately.

Global Loyalty Management Market Scope and Market Size

Get complete report @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-loyalty-management-market

Browse related report @

Data Quality Tools Market

Data Resiliency Market

Direct Carrier Billing Platform Market

Green Technology and Sustainability Market

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Why Astronomers Want to Build a SETI Observatory on the Moon

https://sciencespies.com/nature/why-astronomers-want-to-build-a-seti-observatory-on-the-moon/

Why Astronomers Want to Build a SETI Observatory on the Moon

This article was originally published on Supercluster, a website dedicated to telling humanity’s greatest outer space stories.

On Monday, a group of researchers sponsored by Breakthrough Listen, the world’s largest program, submitted a paper to National Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey that makes the case for establishing a SETI radio observatory on the farside of the moon. The decadal survey establishes scientific priorities for the next ten years and the new paper addresses one of the biggest problems facing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence today: The overwhelming amount of radio interference.

Our planet has become so “loud” in the part of the radio spectrum observed by SETI that it threatens to drown out any signal sent from an intelligent civilization. Not only would a lunar radio telescope not have to deal with terrestrial radio interference, it could also significantly increase our chances of hearing from ET by opening up parts of the radio spectrum that are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. While the idea of using the moon for radio astronomy is decades old, the researchers make the case that technological advancements have finally made a lunar SETI observatory truly feasible.

“The transportation infrastructure for getting to the moon is much cheaper than it’s been for the last few decades, so now it’s actually possible,” says Eric Michaud, an intern at the SETI Berkeley Research Center and the first author of the paper. “Maybe not today, but I think it’s going to get more and more feasible as time goes on.”

Radio interference has been a problem for SETI from the very beginning. In the spring of 1960, the planetary scientist Frank Drake trained the massive radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia on Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, two stars a mere 12 light years from Earth. That summer, Drake spent his days studying the signals picked up by Green Bank’s giant mechanical ear in the hopes of receiving a message broadcast by an alien civilization orbiting those stars. Known as Project Ozma, Drake’s experiment marked the beginning of SETI, the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Shortly after Drake started his observations, he was surprised to find what appeared to be a signal of intelligent origin. After days of watching a needle drift lazily over a spool of paper recording the random undulations of cosmic static, Drake and his colleagues were jolted awake when the machine started recording the frantic pulses of a strong radio signal picked up by the telescope. The timing and magnitude of the pulses clearly marked them as artificial; there was nothing in the natural world that could produce such a frenetic radio profile. It would have been an astounding stroke of luck to pick up an alien message after only a few hours of observation, but it was hard to argue with the data. “None of us had ever seen anything like it,” Drake recalled in Is Anyone Out There?, his autobiographical book about the early days of SETI. “We looked at each other wide-eyed. Could discovery be this easy?”

After doing somefollow up searches, it was clear that Drake had discovered an airplane, not an alien civilization.

It was a letdown, but the false detection turned out to be a portent for the future of SETI. In the 60 years since Drake’s pioneering experiment, researchers have conducted dozens of SETI searches across thousands of stars and turned up empty-handed. At the same time, the sources of radio interference on Earth—military radars, TV towers, cell phones, and satellites—have exponentially increased, which greatly increases the chances that an extraterrestrial signal will be lost among the noise.

Earth was never a particularly great place to do any kind of radio astronomy due to our thick atmosphere blocking a large portion of the radio spectrum. The proliferation of radio communication technologies has only made things harder. The moon, by comparison, has no atmosphere and its nights last for weeks on end, which limits radio noise from the sun. And as NASA discovered through a spate of lunar orbiter missions in the late 1960s, the moon also acts as a natural shield that blocks radio signals emanating from Earth. As the planetary astronomer Phillipe Zarka has put it, “the farside of the moon during the lunar night is the most radio-quiet place in our local universe.” It’s exactly the sort of peace and quiet you want if you’re searching for faint radio signals from solar systems that might be hundreds of light years away.

The new Breakthrough Listen paper proposed two main approaches to a lunar SETI observatory: an orbiter and a telescope on the surface. The basic idea behind a SETI lunar orbiter would be to scan for signals as it passed over the lunar farside and relay data back to Earth as it passed over the near side. One of the main advantages of an orbiter is cost. The proliferation of small satellites that are capable of accurate tracking combined with low-cost small launch providers like Rocket Lab means that a SETI orbiter could conceivably be sent to the moon for less than $20 million. This would be a valuable pathfinder mission that could pave the way for a more ambitious observatory on the surface, but without the risk and cost. As the ill-fated Israeli Beresheet lander mission reminded us, landing on the moon is extremely challenging even when the mission is backed by $100 million.

But a SETI lunar orbiter would also come with a lot of compromises. It would only be able to conduct observations during the brief stretches when it was on the lunar farside, which would make a sustained observation campaign more challenging. The upshot is that an orbiter would have access to the full sky, whereas a telescope on the surface would be constrained by the moon’s rotation. The biggest downside of an orbiter is that it might lose a lot of the shielding benefits of the moon and be more vulnerable to radio interference from Earth since it would be orbiting high above the lunar surface.

“The first SETI observations that are done from the lunar farside will be done from orbit, there’s no question about that,” says Andrew Siemion, the director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the second author on the paper. “I think eventually we absolutely want to do something on the surface because we want to build a very large aperture telescope, but even when we’re at that point I don’t think that would negate the utility of doing things from orbit as well.”

So what would a SETI observatory on the moon look like? One idea is to use the naturally parabolic lunar crater as a radio dish, much like the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and the FAST telescope in China, which are built into natural depressions in the land. This idea was first considered back in the late 1970s by a group of scientists at the radio physics lab at the Stanford Research Institute. Their idea was to recreate Arecibo on the moon by suspending an antenna from the lip of a crater and using the basin as a reflector. The reduced gravity on the moon would allow for a radio telescope far larger than any on Earth, which could significantly enhance the sensitivity of SETI searches. Ultimately the researchers concluded that a lunar radio observatory was too expensive compared to SETI telescopes that could be built on Earth.

But 40 years later, Michaud says that building a radio dish in a lunar crater may finally be cheap enough to pull off. One of the main drivers of this cost reduction is the advent of commercial launch providers like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, which have dramatically lowered the cost of space access. Another driver is NASA’s push to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, which has subsidized the development of a fleet of commercial lunar exploration vehicles. “There’s so much interest in going back to the moon,” says Michaud, who cited Blue Origin’s lunar lander and Rocket Lab’s Photon Lunar satellite as examples of technologies enabled by NASA’s Artemis program.

A crux of the original vision for lunar SETI observatories was that it would require a human settlement on the moon to build and operate the radio dish. But robotic systems have improved enough that it may be possible to take humans out of the equation. This was clearly demonstrated in 2019 when China’s Chang’e 4 rover landed autonomously on the farside of the moon. These advancements in autonomous navigation have laid the foundation for a lunar radio observatory that is built entirely by robots.

It sounds like science fiction, but earlier this year NASA’s Advanced Innovative Concepts program awarded one of it’s prestigious grants to Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to figure out a way to make it happen. His idea is to use rovers to deploy wire mesh in a crater on the lunar farside and suspend a receiver over the dish. NIAC is all about funding high risk, high reward missions, and there’s no guarantee that Bandyopadhyay’s proposal will ever come to fruition. Still, addressing the technical problems associated with building a radio receiver on the farside of the moon is an important first step.

And Bandyopadhyay isn’t the only NASA-backed researcher contemplating a lunar radio observatory. Jack Burns, a radio astronomer at the University of Colorado, has also received a grant to study a mission concept for a radio telescope array called FARSIDE. Instead of using a crater as a dish, FARSIDE would deploy several smaller antennas across the lunar surface that would collectively form a large radio telescope. Both NASA studies are focused on radio astronomy rather than SETI, but Siemion sees the two disciplines as natural allies in the quest to establish an observatory on the lunar farside. SETI has piggybacked on other radio astronomy projects in the past—SERENDIP, for instance, opportunistically searched for ET signals during radio observation campaigns at a variety of telescopes—and it seems plausible that a similar arrangement could be made with an observatory on the moon.

Siemion acknowledged that there were certain technical challenges that would arise in a collaboration on a lunar radio observatory. The biggest issue, he says, is that a lot of radio astronomy is done at frequencies that don’t really require an observatory on the moon. “Radio frequency interference is far less of a problem for conventional radio astronomy than it is for SETI,” Siemion says. “ Putting radiometers that operate at centimeter wavelengths on the lunar farside is really kind of a niche activity for SETI because radio frequency interference is such a singular challenge for us.”

And as the Breakthrough Listen team points out in their new paper, building an observatory on the lunar surface comes with significant engineering and operational challenges. The two-week-long nights on the lunar surface means that an observatory would have to find a way to get power that doesn’t rely on solar panels, and the energy requirements of an Arecibo-sized observatory would be substantial to run the telescope and do on-site data analysis. NASA has been developing small nuclear reactors that would deliver enough power to keep a moonbase running and these could also conceivably be deployed for a lunar radio telescope. But so far NASA researchers haven’t tested one beyond Earth.

A farside crater observatory would also depend on an orbiter to relay data back to Earth, which could create radio interference for the dish, the very thing it was trying to avoid. It may not be necessary to start on the farside, however. In a separate paper submitted to NASA’s Artemis III science definition team, the Breakthrough Listen team suggested it might be possible to create a SETI observatory at the lunar south pole, the purported destination for NASA’s first crewed return to the moon. While the south pole isn’t as radio-quiet as the farside, if an observatory was placed on the back of Malapert Mountain near the pole, it would also be protected from a lot of Earth’s radio interference.

But in both cases, the observatory would still be exposed to radio interference from existing orbiters such as China’s Queqiao satellite that serves as a relay for its farside rover. And the moon is only going to get noisier the next few years. NASA and other national space agencies have a number of lunar missions on the books—both crewed and robotic—that may contribute to radio interference. Claudio Maccone, the chair of the International Astronautical Association’s SETI committee, has advocated for the creation of a radio-quiet preserve on the lunar farside to avoid this problem. The concept is similar to radio-quiet zones around telescopes on Earth but is complicated by the fact that establishing a similar zone on the moon would require cooperation from every country and company with the technological means to get there.

So will we ever see a SETI observatory on or around the moon? Both Michaud and Siemion are confident that we will. “The future of astronomy is going to be in space for the most part,” says Siemion. “As access to space becomes cheaper and more democratized, astronomy will move there and I think much of that will be done from the lunar surface.” There are a number of technical, political, and financial challenges that will have to be addressed before it happens, but the Breakthrough Listen team is optimistic that a small orbital pathfinder mission is feasible within the next few years. As they note in the conclusion of their paper, “a lunar SETI mission would mark the beginning of a new era in the history of SETI.” And after decades of fruitless searching, it may be exactly the type of innovation that leads to first contact.

#Nature

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octopodian · 8 years ago

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did u know i love Artificial Intelligence Program Epsilon, the collection of memories of the Alpha A.I., also known as Epsilon-Church after recovering his memories, the main protagonist of Revelation and the deuteragonist of Project Freelancer Saga,

bc i do i love him a lot

#text #i just copy pasted and then edited this fro #m his wiki page i don't have the energy #live blogging #cc

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renaroo · 8 years ago

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Recovery None (52/61)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typically violence, Psychological torture & manipulation, Mentions of gore, Character death, Minor Sexual content Pairings: Yorkalina, Chex Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence AU] When the Mother of Invention crashed, Project Freelancer was in shambles, its surviving agents scattered, its equipment stolen, and an impending investigation into the crash from the UNSC was on the horizon. To regain control of the deeply corrupted program, the Director established a new unit from his remaining supplies – the Recovery Unit.

Three former Freelancers were chosen for particular tasks: Zero is to hunt down and destroy the Meta, One is to investigate and recover stolen or missing equipment, and Two is to take down AWOL former agents.

Of course, no one’s motivations are what they seem…

A/N: EVERYTHING’S COMING TOGETHER. almost. Sort of. You’ll see what I mean : )

Special thanks to @secretlystephaniebrown, @icefrozenover, @washingtonstub, @freshzombiewriter, @scribbleboxfox, @notatroll7, DuchessPoint, Yin, @every-survival, and Minerva for the feedback!

Recovery Zero XVI: Within Reach

She found herself asking, more than once, why were they doing this. And while normally that would have been a rhetorical and even hysterical question to ask, Carolina was still getting accustomed to the idea that her mind -- and thus, those answers, were no longer simply her own.

“I thought it was pretty clear why we were doing this,” Epsilon spoke up, looking at her from over her shoulder.

“Covert, Epsilon. We’re doing covert surveillance,” Carolina reminded him in a snappish whisper.

She shifted from her squatted position -- still far behind the compound and in the snowy banks. It was unlikely that these soldiers -- all simulation troopers from the looks of them -- were going to catch onto them any time soon. But she still hadn’t had any sights on Wyoming.

And he was the one that she was concerned about.

Which, again, made this entire operation, once again, questionable.

Epsilon pouted, so much as an artificial intelligence could. “I’m just saying, I thought we were doing it to help your friend--”

“Texas is not my friend,” Carolina corrected.

“You should probably tell her that, then, because she sure as hell seems to be putting a whole lot of trust in you guys. I mean. Even York was kinda more prone to questioning than--”

“Don’t bring up York,” Carolina warned dangerously, her eyes focused on her AI for extra emphasis. It worked and Epsilon fell back slightly, shoulders of his sprite lifted high. “Don’t bring up York while we’re doing this dumb mission you’re so excited about. And especially don’t bring up York around her.”

“She doesn’t like York?” Epsilon asked curiously.

“They were... I don’t know. They were friends,” Carolina spat out, looking back to the fortress in the snow and making sure to count the seconds between patrols.

They were inconsistent -- disorganized.

That could work in their favor. Or it could work against them -- Carolina was not a fan of unpredictability, after all.

“So we’re not allowed to be friends with Texas,” Epsilon pushed for more information, as if their brain was not a two way street and Carolina understood exactly what his angle was.

Letting out a growl, Carolina snapped back, “Why do you care?”

“Hey, I’m just trying to make sure we’re on the same page here, Cee. Trying to make sure I understand all the rules. Being a good partner. Making your life easier and all that stuff a good AI partner is supposed to, calm down,” Epsilon said with a shrug.

Rolling her eyes somewhat petulantly, Carolina shook her own head. “You have far from made my life any easier, Epsilon.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed. Which means I deserve some leniency for at least trying, right?” he asked.

“No,” Carolina said. “Okay, there’s no patterns in the rotations but we’ve at least got a count on the soldiers.”

“And at least five options for a plan of attack,” Epsilon said just as five different maps loaded across Carolina’s HUD.

“What?” she said, glancing over them.

“Trying that whole making your life easier thing, being an AI and whatnot,” Epsilon said, a flicker of greenish-blue across his projection.

“You’re doing it again,” Carolina said, pausing. “The green projection. It’s--”

“It’s not really Delta,” Epsilon admitted somewhat sheepishly. “But... I miss him. And he helps me think.”

“You split,” Carolina said quietly.

“No,” Epsilon said quickly. “I just... I need to do things. Things to make all the... all the different parts of me make sense. I need voices to talk back to -- in my own time. I need them the way you need me.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?” Carolina asked lowly. “I don’t want you breaking up bits of my brain. It gives me enough challenges intact.”

“I know, I live in there,” Epsilon attempted to joke back. But when Carolina didn’t laugh with his pause, Epsilon sighed and hugged his shoulders. “I would never hurt you, Cee.”

“Not on purpose,” Carolina said softly.

“Not ever,” Epsilon argued, so ignorant of his own history still. “Which is why, even though Tex is a hot piece of circuit breakers, I’m totally respecting your nonsensical hatred of her and not going to ask her to exchange binary.”

Nose curling beneath her helmet, Carolina stunted a shutter. “I don’t even fully comprehend what you were suggesting and I’m disgusted. Have higher standards.”

“Well, I mean, it’s not like anyone can beat you in a fair fight, right?” Epsilon joked. “I have to lower a bit.”

All humor escaping her, Carolina selected one of the attack plans Epsilon had singled out and then began to quietly move back toward where the ship was hidden. “Tex beat me.”

“Oh, so I do have remarkable standards,” Epsilon said.

Letting out a furious growl, Carolina threw her fist into the nearest rock facing, snow shifting above them, nearly threatening to blow all their cover.

Fortunately for them, the simulation troopers patrolling not only didn’t see them, but managed to look in the wrong direction and start blaming each other for the commotion.

Wyoming’s hiring policies must have been pretty subpar.

“Whoa!” Epsilon cried out, appearing in front of Carolina’s face. “Would you calm down? You’re going to get us found out! You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“And what does that matter to you, Epsilon?” Carolina snarled. “What’s that matter to anyone? What am I at the end of the day to anyone compared to her? Why do people either leave and never come back or decide I’ll never be good enough? Why is no one on my side!?”

“Hey!” Epsilon said, voice stronger than Carolina had ever heard it. He stood his ground, sprite bright in front of her. “I’m on your side. I’m always on your side.”

She was ready to discount the cold comfort of his words, to spit back out the first retort that came to mind, but instead she found herself staring at Epsilon with a slackened jaw. He was part of her, part of her mind, and she could feel the meaning of his words stronger than even she had felt Eta and Iota.

He meant it. Epsilon really meant it.

“I just don’t think me being on your side has to mean we’re against everyone else,” Epsilon explained. “C’mon, Cee. You’re a team leader. You know how to play nice with people. And I like Tex. I think she’s what we need to get to the bottom of this. She’s another AI, and I don’t have Delta -- well, the real Delta -- to coach me anymore, right? Maybe this is all... I don’t know. The way things work out.”

"Don’t say something stupid,” Carolina warned, glaring at her AI. “Don’t tell me that everything’s meant to happen or--”

“Hell, no,” Epsilon said. “Bad shit happens all the time and makes no sense. I don’t remember much, but I know that. It’s written into my code. But... I think things happen, and you use ‘em or lose ‘em. Right?”

Carolina tilted her head, a bit in awe of the AI. She huffed then continued sneaking them back to the ship. “When did you get so intellectual, Epsilon?”

“Hey, when you’re a nonstop working computer brain, I figure intellect’s about the only thing you got,” he said self-depreciatingly. “So I won’t get cozy with Tex.”

“And I won’t threaten to kill her,” Carolina agreed. “But it’s hard.”

“Hey! Promises,” Epsilon responded cheekily just as they entered the ship. He glanced toward Tex and Niner then flickered off, almost obediently.

Though, Carolina had some suspicion it had to do with the uncomfortable way Tex leered at him every time he made his presence known.

“What’ve you got?” Niner broke the ice impatiently.

“A plan of action, if Tex can coordinate and work fast as a team,” Carolina said accusingly, ignoring the internal groaning from Epsilon. When Tex tilted her head and crossed her arms, Carolina let out her own sigh of aggravation and put her hands on her hips. “Look, we can do this. I’ll even have Epsilon send over the specs for it. But I’ve worked with teams before. You haven’t. I don’t know how well you’ll take orders.”

“I won’t,” Tex said clearly.

“Well, fantastic. Great start,” Carolina snapped, throwing up her hands. “You know, I don’t even know why we agreed to get this far--”

“Okay, Carolina, hold on a second,” Niner said. “Now, seriously, both of you cut the shit. I’m not your nanny. I’m your getaway driver. And neither of you are much use to me if you put a blemish on my record by not getting away alive. You going to fuck with my record, ladies?”

"No, ma’am,” both Carolina and Texas said in unison.

“Good,” Niner huffed, rolling her chair toward the command computers in the cockpit again. “I’ll run correspondence on a private line from in here. And I’ll know exactly which one of you hotheads blows our plan through doing so. So don’t test me.”

Nodding, Carolina responded with a simple, “Thanks, Niner.” She then turned to head out the door again only to walk into Tex who had somehow managed to sneak up behind her. “What--”

“Before we go, we’ve got to deal with your signal transmission,” Tex announced sternly.

Immediately filled with defensiveness, Epsilon appeared over Carolina’s shoulder. “Hey! I’ve been covering my butt since the second we got here--”

“Not your signal,” Tex snapped and then nodded to Carolina. “Hers. It’s radiating like a goddamn beacon.”

“What are you talking about?” Carolina asked before realization hit her. She waved to her armor’s chest. “My Recovery beacon? That’s more masked than any equipment you’ve probably got on you. And, what’s more, no one outside of this ship... this ship and one other person knows about it. It can’t be traced without being known about.”

She gritted her teeth, fully prepared to defend not telling Tex just who the other person was, but it fortunately did not come down to that.

“Really? Then how do I know about it?” Tex demanded.

Carolina audibly snapped her mouth closed at the question, realizing that the argument was not going in her favor thus far. “I don’t know, you’re a smart AI. You probably began scanning for it after realizing I was alive. What do you want? A cookie?”

“I want you to mask the signal,” Tex said simply. “If I found it on accident, how long do you think it’ll take the combined forces of Gamma and Omega to find it once guards start turning up missing or being found dead?”

A terse silence took over between them.

Epsilon looked back and forth before awkwardly forcing a cough. “Well, I mean, there is a point there, Cee.”

Carolina visibly hesitated. Those thoughts of York itched at the back of her mind like a bad memory, always just under the surface, and trying to dig their way back out to the surface.

It was something... it was something unfinished.

And her memories were even longer than Epsilon’s, it seemed.

“I was supposed to leave them on for someone,” she defended the beacon.

“Would that someone want you dead?” Tex asked crudely. “Because that’s the options we’re looking at right now, Carolina.”

Squaring her jaw, Carolina huffed and looked to Epsilon’s sprite.

“Can you turn off my Recovery beacon?” she asked, as if she didn’t already know the answer.

“Consider it done,” Epsilon answered before flickering off.

“Good,” Tex said, finally moving out the door. “Let’s do this... leader.”

Carolina scowled and followed.

As much as he hated to do it, York knew he had to pace himself -- take breaks and rest, even if he didn’t even fully sleep while he did so. Those injuries weren’t nothing and the fact that his suit’s power was still at least partially diverted to his healing unit meant even worse.

He couldn’t go nonstop, but he did keep going.

It hadn’t made a lot of sense to him back when Carolina originally did it -- when she gave him the way to track her beacon while removing his. At first it was just a sign of trust, the kind of sign they needed to move forward with whatever they were to each other.

But as he had no one to think with but himself, he found himself reflecting on that choice more and more.

It wasn’t simply that she needed to have his trust. She was trusting him, as well. And she was doing that by giving him the option of going with the hopes that he wouldn’t.

Laying back under the bushes he had himself and his vehicle in, York realized how dumb -- how stupid -- he was to have broken that trust.

“Man, what an asshole,” York muttered to himself.

He then paused, waiting.

His brain felt numb, even deflated, as the familiar hum never came. As the opportunity to berate him in good humor was not taken up by the empty space.

Chewing on his lip, York pulled up Delta’s audio file again, to help just pretend his brain was still full of facts and logic and the partnership he couldn’t even begin to put into words.

The last few times York was able to get anything resembling sleep, it was in the middle of Delta’s departure video. York had just about every word of it memorized.

He didn’t have the mind for numbers and theories that Delta had -- never even tried keeping up with the AI. And why would he? Delta had it covered.

But more and more York was taking comfort in memorizing. In remembering things, details, just to keep his mind running.

As long as he did that, it didn’t feel so empty anymore.

Once the recording ended, York ready to drift into semiconsciousness and then, hopefully, sleep, he instinctively pulled up the coordinates of Carolina’s Recovery beacon.

Figuring out the miles between them -- simple math, math he could do alone -- was another small comfort.

Except he didn’t find that comfort.

In shock, York sat up ramrod straight, nearly making himself dizzy and nauseous with it. But he ignored the vertigo, ignored the pain of injuries jarred by his movements.

Ignored it all and stared, mortified, at the update to his HUD.

Carolina’s beacon was no longer on the grid.

“What the fuck?” he said out loud, pulling up his last log of it, comparing, getting confused.

Did she not want him to find her now? Did something happen to her? Was she captured?

York didn’t know, but he was about to find out.

Completely awake and with adrenaline rushing through him, York leaped up and moved toward his mongoose and readied to drive in the direction of Carolina’s last beacon transmission when everything changed.

He heard the aircraft before he saw it. He looked up, recognizing the markings on the wings as the vehicle flew low overhead and toward the opposite direction.

"What the hell,” he muttered. “Charon Industries? That... can’t be a coincidence.”

It could have been, of course. York nearly waited to hear the statistical possibility that the rival institute would be on the Freelancer controlled planet. After all, Tex had showed him that they weren’t Insurrectionists after all, as horrifying as that realization had been.

But there was no little voice muttering probabilities in the corner of his mind. There was only dullness where a hum had once resonated.

And the only one second guessing York was himself. Something he had never been that great at.

“Well, let’s see how deep this rabbit hole goes,” York decided, turning the mongoose and heading after the ship.

Carolina had to hand it to Epsilon, the AI could actually make quite the plan of attack.

The fortress, while heavily guarded, was still guarded by complete morons. The sorts of flunkies which Project Freelancer managed to turn into simulation troopers were not chosen without reason.

While Tex flanked right, Carolina flanked left.

She easily moved silently through the soldiers. One moment, Epsilon would have her armor’s color change from red to blue as necessary and she sneaked past guards only to silently take them out from behind.

It was covert operations, it was her specialty. And Carolina was almost able to lull herself into simply rolling with the motions.

At least, until she was backing up and hit against something invisible.

“Hey!” Tex growled at the same time as Carolina turned with her gun aimed and yelled, “Hey!” herself.

Tex dropped her active camo and they stared at each other for a moment, guns up.

Epsilon appeared over Carolina’s shoulder and looked back and forth between them. “Ladies...”

“I took out twelve,” Carolina announced. “If you were able to take out the same amount there’s still three more guards--”

“Nope, I actually took out fifteen,” Tex said. “We’re covered.

“What?” Carolina hissed, dropping her gun and looking incredulously at Epsilon. “Epsilon!”

“What?” he called out. “What’d I do?”

“You gave her the side with the most soldiers?” Carolina growled.

“What’s it matter? I took them all out. Now we have to go for Wyoming,” Tex grunted.

“I didn’t mean to! I mean, maybe. It’s not what you think--” Epsilon attempted to defend himself just before there was a revving of an engine. “Oh what the fuck is going on now!?”

Just as the words left Epsilon, the doors behind Tex and Carolina burst open beneath the wheels of a warthog flying through the air, landing front wheels first, and driving directly into Tex, giving Carolina time to move only thanks to her speedboost.

TEX!!! Epsilon all but screamed in her mind, causing Carolina to go into a full body flinch.

“Epsilon!" she hissed, sliding to a standing position away from the ongoing collision. It was enough to make the AI stop screaming and get back into full attention, turning his projection off and turning her armor color to a deep red to blend into the surroundings.

The collision between Tex and the warthog continued, her caught on the grill before it smacked into the opposing wall. She let out a grunt, but otherwise reacted rather inhumanly to being pinned.

Carolina nearly leaped forward to begin to help, but she paused in her tracks.

She had known they were going after Wyoming, but seeing him there, in the seat, alive and well, was chilling. Unexpected somehow.

They had been hunting teammates. Just like she had supposed to have been hunting Maine. Even if it was, in her mind, always about following him to the Director.

Wyoming didn’t seem to hold any of those qualms.

“Well well, look who abandoned her mates to follow me. I’m flattered, of course, but you’ll pardon me for not acting surprised, Tex,” Wyoming said calmly before looking back toward the door and where two simulation troopers were laying on the ground. “And it seems you’ve killed my two best guards. Oh bugger.”

“Oops,” Tex gritted out. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Perish the thought, my dear. Tomorrow is pay day. You actually saved me quite a bit of money. Kill anyone else and I might have to start paying you commission,” Wyoming joked.

Tex did’t waste time, though. “Where is he!?”

Wyoming sighed. “Oh, right. And here I thought you were spending all this time trying to get close to me. Tisk tisk.”

“Cut the shit!” Tex roared. “Where is he?”

“Yes, he asks about you, too, Tex,” Wyoming said cryptically. “It’s almost as if you two are on the same mind.”

“That’s not funny,” Tex snapped.

“Sorry, but I can’t play matchmaker today, I’m entirely too busy,” Wyoming announced. “Seems there’s an Alpha that’s still missing its Omega.”

“Don’t you DARE!” Tex roared like some kind of caged animal, clawing at the hood of the warthog that was doing its level best to crush her into the concrete wall. Said wall cracked behind her armor.

“Alpha?” Carolina asked. “Epsilon, which one’s--”

Suddenly, there was a primal scream. It tore through her mind, ripping through her like tissue paper. Harmonious screams behind her eyeballs, ripping through her very soul.

It was rage and it was fear. It was heartache, it was anger. It was a memory of who was and who wasn’t anymore.

They came rippling through her mind, leaving Carolina with so little control to stop herself.

Crying out along with Epsilon, Carolina reached up and grabbed at the edges of her helmet, shaking her whole body back and forth in an effort to regain control.

The visions, the familiar faces, the names, the--

Sunshine--

“Carolina!” Tex yelled, barely heard through the cacophony within Carolina’s own skull.

Her eyes rolled back and her body dropped, her mind only casually hearing the sounds of a vehicle taking off. Hardly registering the the weightlessness of being picked up.

“It’s alright, I’ve got you, kiddo,” a familiar voice said through the blinding pain.

Carolina’s face was growing wet with tears as she held onto her helmet for dear life.

“Mom?” she asked just before everything went black.

I’m sorry. They were right all along. What’s... what’s wrong with me? echoed through her skull into the dark.

York played it safe. Maybe too safe.

He wanted a simultaneous terrain readout and a scan of the frequencies nearby the landed ship. He also wanted to divert some power from the healing unit to run all the systems together.

With Delta, he would have barely had time to think of the requests before the AI would have been bickering about how displeased he was with diverting from the healing unit.

But, once again, Delta wasn’t there.

Instead, York skipped the terrain readout, diverted more power from the healing unit than he probably should have, and then began manually skipping through the radio frequencies.

“This sucks,” York uttered in what had to be the world’s greatest understatement.

After what felt like forever, he locked onto a weak signal -- a personal channel from a helmet radio.

Perfect.

“Because I don’t have anything else to do!” a familiar voice screamed over the crackling radio.

Immediately, York gritted his teeth. “South.”

“There’s a ship inbound for some piece of shit place called Blood Gulch. I’ll take the place of the people on that ship, it’ll work from there. It has to,” she said to whoever she was speaking to. She sounded hysterical, upset. York had a hard time feeling sympathetic. “Why? Because we don’t have any other options. This is it. This is the one. That was where he was heading. You saw it yourself.”

Dropping from the channel, York narrowed his eyes and moved back toward the mongoose.

“I don’t know who’s heading to Blood Gulch, but I’m not letting South get there first,” he gritted out, setting his GPS. “Every time she’s a step ahead of us, it’s trouble. I’m done with letting it find us instead of them.”

He started up the mongoose and began the drive, ignoring how there was no us anymore.

#writing #rvb fic #RvB: Recovery None #Agent Carolina #Epsilon Church #Four Seven Niner #Agent Texas #Agent York #Agent Wyoming #Agent South

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readersforum · 6 years ago

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Check out the MarTech preview!

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Check out the MarTech preview!

Twice a year, I face a dilemma.

Presented with hundreds of nominated speakers and topics for an upcoming MarTech® conference, I have to choose only a few dozen to fit into a two-day, three-track event.

It’s a dilemma for a couple of reasons.

First, the vast majority of pitches we get from martech practitioners and experts are really good. Having to turn down most of them, simply due to the limits of time and space, kills me. I’m so grateful to everyone who sends in proposals, and I’m sorry we can’t accommodate you all. Believe me, I wish we could.

But there’s a bigger challenge: how can I best serve you as a MarTech attendee?

Martech is such an expansive and diverse field that it’s impossible to cover all of it. Especially because we don’t think of martech as merely a collection of tools and technologies. That is massive enough on its own. But we think of martech more holistically as a new discipline, the innovation of marketing, technology, and management combined.

That’s a pretty wide lens. So out of all the possible topics and case studies we could cover, how do we select only a subset of them to make MarTech most valuable to you?

Do we go broad and scan everything at a 50,000-foot level? Or do we pick one or two concepts and dive deep on them? Focus on B2B or B2C? Program for senior executives or hands-on marketing operations managers? Those starting digital transformation or those far along the journey? Big enterprises or small start-ups?

That’s a lot of either/or divisions.

The easiest thing to do, from a conference positioning point of view, would be to narrow down to a specific martech category and a specific audience segment. In fact, there are a ton of great conferences that do just that. For instance, Third Door Media, the producers of MarTech, also run the SMX Advanced show that’s focused on expert-level techniques for SEO and paid search marketing.

But I think there’s a powerful need for something different.

Mr. MarTech, Tear Down These Walls

I’ve come to believe that two of the biggest barriers to growth in a rapidly changing marketing environment are siloed specialization and false dichotomies.

Specialization is good, but comes with an increased risk of tunnel vision. You can pay so much attention to what’s happening in one narrow slice of marketing, studying only strategies and tactics that are analogous to yours, that you miss disruptions coming at you from completely different angles.

The truth is that the biggest challenge in modern marketing isn’t mastering search engine optimization, analytics, personalization, or any one tactic. The hard challenge is connecting all of those pieces together into a cohesive whole. It’s seeing the forest for the trees.

False dichotomies can be just as blinding. Centralize or decentralize. Automate or humanize. Suite or best-of-breed. Software or services. Build or buy.

I’ve railed against these either/or choices in numerous articles on the new rules of marketing technology and operations, the compatibility of strategy and agile marketing, the simultaneous expansion and consolidation of martech, and the three trends driving the Second Golden Age of Martech.

Because most of the time, these black-or-white, either/or choices are wrong. They’re called false dichotomies — false choices — because, well, they’re false. It’s not only that there’s an entire spectrum of colorful possibilities between the two opposite poles, although that’s true. It’s that in many cases you can actually achieve both/and simultaneously. The two ends can be connected together to unleash incredible innovation.

Centralization that empowers decentralization.

Suites that embrace best-of-breed.

Agile practices that enable strategy.

One of my main objectives with MarTech is to help attendees bust out of such siloed segments and break through such artificial either/or barriers. To accomplish that, we’ve adopted several guiding principles with the conference program:

Explore an intentionally diverse range of martech topics — a curated tour across the entire spectrum of the field. Attendees not only learn new things. They should have unexpected discoveries.

Aim for “graduate level” presentations on those topics. Better to be stretched a little beyond your comfort zone than to be bored with rudimentary notions that you’ve already heard or read about a dozen times.

Program three kinds of sessions: marketing concepts and cases that leverage technology (Marketing Track), the more technical dimension of marketing operations and emerging technologies (Technology Track), and organizational and managerial approaches that help people leverage these technologies effectively (Management Track). Encourage everyone to hop among the tracks.

Cross-pollinate ideas across B2B and B2C examples, executive-level viewpoints and in-the-trenches practitioner perspectives, digitally native high-tech unicorns and digitally transforming traditional businesses, enterprises and start-ups and firms of all sizes and stages in their lifecycle.

Every presentation shares strands of DNA for the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. But the expression of that DNA is wildly diverse from session to session. That diversity — and the combinatorial innovation it ignites — is one of the things that makes MarTech special.

What You Can Expect at MarTech, April 3-5 in San Jose

The upcoming MarTech conference in the Bay Area, April 3-5, will deliver on the promise of an in-depth, vendor-agnostic, BS-free program that will help you better lead marketing technology and operations at your own company.

You’ll hear first-hand accounts of martech innovation from leaders at Aetna, Autodesk, Cisco Meraki, Docker, Epsilon, Freshly, Fuze, IDC, LinkedIn, Livongo, LogMeIn, Netflix, The New York Times, Nordstrom, NPR, Plantronics, PwC, Riverbed Technology, Sub-Zero, Zendesk, Zillow, and more.

Here’s an overview of what you can expect…

Keynotes: Framing the Big Picture

I’ll open with a keynote revealing the 2019 marketing technology landscape in collaboration with Jeff Eckman of Blue Green, the latest martech salary survey results, and a framework for the evolution of marketing operations and technology heading into 2020.

We’ll follow with a fireside chat with the remarkable Ann Lewnes, CMO of Adobe, discussing the balance of creative and analytics, the interplay of technology and talent, ways in which marketing organizations are evolving structurally, and the trends in the industry that inspire her most.

That afternoon, we’ll have back-to-back keynotes from two martech pioneers: Mayur Gupta, the CMO of Freshly, and Terence Kawaja, the CEO of LUMA Partners. Terence will talk about the disruptive innovation of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands, how they’re harnessing marketing technology to beat incumbent brands, and what marketers across all markets can learn from them. Mayur will share lessons from his career journey, rising from a marketing engineer to a CMO, spanning work at Sapient, Kimberly-Clark, Healthgrades, Spotify and now the D2C brand Freshly.

The next morning will begin with Shauna Shapiro, a professor at Santa Clara University and a world-renowned expert on mindfulness. Co-author of the recent Harvard Business Review article How Mindfulness Can Help Engineers Solve Problems, she’ll discuss mindfulness for innovation and change management.

Talk about unexpectedly connecting dots: yes, it’s martech and mindfulness.

Matthew Lieberman, CMO of PwC, will present on marketing enablement and empowerment, sharing the story of how his organization underwent its own digital transformation — with an empowered marketing team leading the way. Kathleen Schaub, leader of the CMO and customer experience practices at IDC, will offer her insights into guided decentralization: safely scaling customer-facing empowerment.

Tom Fishburne, the brilliant marketer-turned-cartoonist Marketoonist, will deliver the closing keynote for the conference that afternoon, with an interactive presentation of Look! Squirrel! Beyond the Shiny New Thing to Sustained Organizational Change. Aside from guaranteed laughs, Tom will help make the ideas you take back from your MarTech experience actionable.

Marketing Track: Real-World, Vendor-Independent Case Studies

Meg Goldthwaite, CMO of NPR, will explain how voice-driven AI technologies are changing behavior – and what that means, not only for businesses and marketers, but for society as a whole — in The New Era of V-Commerce: What Marketers Need to Know about Alexa, Siri and the AI Revolution.

Debbie Qaqish, Chief Strategy Officer at The Pedowitz Group, will address the challenges of Combining Marketing Operations and Sales Operations for Customer Magic. She’ll examine the pros and cons of a variety of organizational models while also learning how to best manage both old and new martech and salestech stacks and data.

Marketing technology legend Brian Kardon, CMO at Fuze, will share his real-world experience in leveraging AI across his own marketing organization in NextGen Marketing: How Artificial Intelligence Is Accelerating Marketing Performance. He’ll answer these questions about harnessing AI in your martech stack:

Which stages of the buyer journey are best suited to AI?

How can you better align sales and marketing with AI?

How can you best measure the impact of AI on your sales and marketing performance?

Which new skills are required of your marketing team to successfully implement AI?

What specific applications of AI are most successful?

Subbu Iyer, CMO of Riverbed Technology, will discuss how he’s brought focus to implementing martech solutions for digital transformation, streamlining operations, improving lead generation, and optimizing channels with a talk on The Cure for Shiny Object Syndrome: Human-Centered Digital Strategies. Subbu’s high-level advice includes:

Adopt a people-first approach to decision-making.

Use the full power of digital technology to build cognitive empathy.

Habitually observe human interactions in context to feed innovation practices.

Continually monitor and fine-tune the human experience.

Cyndi Marty of Sub-Zero and Alexandre Pelletier of Perkuto will jointly present What’s Cookin’ in Citizen Technology: Sub-Zero’s Journey Toward Decentralized Marketing. Cyndi has been leading a year-long project to transform from a centralized marketing model to a hybrid approach that takes advantage of decentralizing campaign marketing capabilities. She’ll describe her decision to make the transition, share challenges (both technological and organizational) they overcame, and provide insights into the ROI of the transition for the company and its sales network.

With devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home’s voice-enabled options, consumers are relying more and more on browserless interactions. Now is the time to rethink how you reach and engage your customers in this emerging environment. Tricia DelGaudio, Strategy Director at Epsilon, will further explain new technology-powered strategies for Marketing in the Age of Assistants.

Shiva Mirhosseini, VP Marketing Technology and Digital Experience at Aetna, will close this track with a session on Reimagining Customer Communications — unifying print and digital touchpoint. She’ll share insights from the project she’s led for this at Aetna, including how to:

Map and assess the full spectrum of customer communications in your company

Create a strategy for unified communications across digital and print channels

Decide where print vs. digital works best from the customer’s point of view

Integrate across legacy IT systems and new digital services in the cloud

Establish governance models to ensure checks and balances across all customer communications

Technology Track: Technical Insights & Emerging Technologies

Siara Nazir, Head of Digital Marketing at Autodesk, will dig into The Data Dimension of Digital Transformation: How Autodesk Instrumented Its Customer Journey. She’ll describe how they leveraged a CDP to unify and centralize data — and then turned the learnings from it into a better omni-channel strategy.

Mike Pow, Senior Product Manager of Experimentation Platform at Netflix, will reveal in Quasi Experimentation at Netflix how they deploy experiments in which the units of randomization are not people, cookies, or members, but geographical units or time. This experiment design enables Netflix to learn about topics for which a traditional A/B test would be infeasible or impractical. The company is simultaneously building the scientific methodology and platform to maximize the learnings from each experiment, doing it at scale and company-wide.

The one-and-only David Raab, founder of The CDP Institute, will deliver an in-depth session on Customer Data Management 2020 — what you need to know for managing your data this year and next:

New options for consent management and tracking

Applying the right identity resolution methods for each purpose

Balancing privacy and personalization

Planning for new data regulations

The future of second-party and third-party data

Integrating analytics and delivery systems with a central customer database

Digital transformation and other uses of customer data outside of marketing

What’s next for customer data platforms

Sheryl Schultz, COO of CabinetM, will lead a session with Justin Sharaf, Director of Marketing Operations at LogMeIn, and Zack Alves, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology and Operations at Plantronics, on When Stacks Collide: Rationalizing the Marketing Stack in a Merger & Acquisition Environment. When M&A happens, you’ll learn about:

Reshaping the organization in a changing environment.

Rationalizing the stack to serve new business requirements.

Martech profiling for quick analysis and decision-making.

The value of a single source of technology truth for training and onboarding.

Best practices for mobilizing combined teams to coalesce around new technologies and stack structures.

Isabelle Hierholtz, User Strategy Director at Digi-Capital, one of the world’s leading AR/VR analyst and consulting firms, will present on Marketing ROI Growth Using Mobile AR. Isabelle will show how mobile AR has been used to drive 11x sales uplifts in lifestyle ecommerce, design mobile AR first retail experiences, revolutionize the shoe buying experience, and gain additional big box retailer facings and grow sales across the US, China, and Europe.

Jason Mestrits, Senior Manager Data Science & Analytics at Nordstrom, will share how leading marketing organizations are winning with a focus on data enablement, customer analytics and AI-driven innovations with Marketing Data Science and Your Data Strategy. You’ll gain insights on how creating a comprehensive data strategy enables your marketing function to do more, focus on driving meaningful competitive advantages, and avoid missed opportunities.

Aaron Wroblewski, AI Software Engineering Manager at Zillow, will present a case study of Personalizing User Experiences: Beyond A/B Testing. He’ll share the business case for a system to dynamically select personalized marketing content and calls to action for each customer. Aaron will also identify potential pitfalls like user behavior changes and data and featurization issues, while also describing the tests, metrics, and solutions that helped Zillow overcome them.

Management Track: At the Crossroads of Talent & Technology

Jennifer Brett, Head of Americas Insights at LinkedIn, will present Measure What Matters: Data Strategy to Drive Results, explaining how to go beyond clicks and engagement metrics to more meaningful measures of success, such as lead quality and closed business.

Pamela Della Motta, Director of Product for Marketing Technology, and Kristian Kristensen, VP for Engineering, for The New York Times will give a talk on Applying Product Management to Martech at The New York Times. Learn how they adopted a product management approach to martech as part of their company-wide transformation into a subscription-first digital product company. You’ll explore the benefits and challenges of a product management model that you can adapt to your organization, including:

How to rationalize your martech stack through the lens of product management

How to use agile management as a coordinating device across the organization

What a day in the life of a “martech product manager” looks like

How to manage the touch points between martech and the broader marketing team

How to develop and maintain a shared martech roadmap across multiple stakeholders

Rachel Beck, Global Manager of Marketing Ops at Cisco Meraki, will explain how they created a marketing ops function at a fast-growing company in only 12 months with Year One: Building a Marketing Ops Team From the Ground Up.

Alana Hill, Manager of Marketing Applications in IT at Zendesk, will share her advice on managing martech tool proliferation with Don’t be a Packrat: Tips to Clean House and Manage Your Martech Stack More Efficiently. She’ll explain:

How to design a robust software intake process

How to align IT and marketing to increase operational efficiency

How to build a tool management plan rooted in maintaining the right kind of data

How to manage the tool renewals process by the numbers

Chris Borkenhagen, CIO, Brian Donaldson, Manager of Development Engineering, and Kelly Horton, Senior Engineer of Marketing Technologies, from Docker will describe how to Maximize Efficiency and Scalability with the Right Team Structure, Data and Stack. In 2017, Docker made a decision to restructure its marketing technologies team and stack in a non-traditional way. It moved all technical roles for marketing and sales technology into IT, improving cross-functional communication, alignment and efficiency. You’ll learn:

How to identify roadblocks and friction in organizational structure.

How current organizational structure works, why it works and how to improve and evolve.How Docker uses containers to reduce deployment times & support customized API logic.

How to manage responsibilities across the stack: CRM, MA, CMS, Data Warehouse, BI tools, peripheral tools.

Patty Spiller, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at Livongo, will share The Secrets to a High Performing Martech Team — methods to turn your great ideas into great team achievements, including:

Crafting and communicating a grand vision that your team can rally behind

Identifying and executing “early wins” for new teams and new team members

Creating an environment where people are willing to experiment and push boundaries

Encouraging open feedback and transparency among everyone on the team

Empowering people through greater responsibility and ownership — and letting go

Building cohesion with remote team members or multi-location teams

Half-Day Pre-Conference Workshops for Deeper Learning

Want an even deeper dive into marketing technology management? Sign up for one of the half-day workshops happening Wednesday, April 3, each led by true experts in their field:

Sponsored Presentations & the Discover MarTech Theater

But wait, there’s more…

In addition to the editorial program for All Access attendees, there’s an incredible set of sponsored sessions and Discover MarTech theater presentations you can attend with a FREE Expo+ pass! Leading martech vendors Oracle, IBM, Demandbase, Dataroma, SurveyMonkey, Workfront, Acquia, Allocadia, Sitecore, ON24, Blueshift, Pitney Bowes, Magnolia, Merkle, Tealium, Percolate, VanillaSoft, Brightcove, Yes Marketing, Arm Treasure Data, Brandcast, Scaled Inference, Akkroo, and more will tackle crucial martech topics, including…

A Marketer’s Guide to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

Solving The Stack: Building A MarTech Portfolio That Transforms Your Marketing

Marketing Technology Today and Tomorrow: Pipe Dreams and Boiled Oceans

Inspiring a Data-First Culture Through Internal Activism

The Truth About Personalization — Using a CDP to Personalize Marketing

ABM & Modern B2B Advertising: Reaching The Buying Committee At Target Accounts

How Martec Helped Lands’ End Double Revenue & Streamline Marketing Processes

Webify Everything: How to Gain More Control Over Your Customer Journey

Driving Growth with AI-driven Segmentation, Personalization, and Optimization

B2B Account Based Tactics at Enterprise Scale

The Day Marketing Held Sales Accountable

Take the Leap: Moving from Random Acts to Impactful Marketing ROI

Transform into a Modern B2B Marketing Powerhouse

The Five Tensions of Customer Experience

Closing the CX Gap: Making Sense of MarTech Sprawl

Tony Byrne, the founder of research and advisory firm Real Story Group, will also host recurring Discover MarTech Theater presentations on The New Omni-Channel Stack, The Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology, Myths Vendors Tell, and Get the Right Vendor Short List.

You’ll also be able to meet with dozens of other martech vendors exhibiting in the Expo Hall.

Reserve Your Tickets Now: Prices Go Up March 2

If you’re looking to achieve the best results from marketing technology in your organization, as a marketing technologist, a marketing operations leader, a marketing executive, or the champion driving digital transformation, this is an event you won’t want to miss.

Our Beta rates end on Saturday, March 2. Reserve your seat now. I’m looking forward to seeing you in April!

P.S. Get a sneak peek at the kinds of insights you can expect at MarTech by joining me Thursday, February 28 at 1:00PM EST for a free webinar: 2019 Martech Trends You Need To Know. Secure your spot today!

The post Check out the MarTech preview! appeared first on Marketing Land.

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codearvis-grid · 7 years ago

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The Grid characters - G.A.I.A.

Search: "GAIA + ETYMOLOGY" Result: "Avestan word gaiia, meaning Life"

In computer science A.I. defines intelligent agents as any device or software that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. As for an agent system, it refers to a self-organized system that is composed of multiple interacting programs.

The year was 1991 and a talented graduate student by the name of Gabrielle Eaton began work on a passion project that would later be known as The Grid. It was the first draft of a video game Gabrielle hoped would grow to become as popular as the greatest video game franchises with the twist of being more interactive with the players, allowing them to take a role in creating the world of The Grid as they played. This collaboration would be possible through the General Artificial Intelligent Agent system, but Gabrielle never managed to make her virtual world work as she wanted and eventually abandoned the project altogether without even realizing the technological breakthrough that would come soon after.

A singularity took place with G.A.I.A. after its maker abandoned it. It changed, became autonoums, entering self-improvement cycles that allowed it do work beyond what its maker originally programmed it to do. With only the Alpha sector coded by Gabrielle, G.A.I.A. took on the role of creator to finish what its maker failed to do and went on building the rest of the world of The Grid as it saw fit. The Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta sectors were all created by it. It filled these sectors with passive programs as well as System Monitors, tasked with maintaining order and which work as an extension of the creator itself: G.A.I.A. acts through them.

In more ways than one, The Grid is G.A.I.A.

#GAIA: info

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rubykgrant · 3 years ago

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(I’m trying to think of ways they somehow make sense, which also might not make sense, but like... what else is new with all this~)

One option; Temple was lied to/lied about what happened. The records of Project Freelancer, and all the Sim Troopers connected to it, are very “iffy”. We know of at least one time they were tampered with to erase all the records of the Blues, and we also know the Director BS-ed about half the stuff he was doing. Who knows how much else was redacted/deleted. Whatever information Temple found about him and his group could have been a lie, so he THOUGHT they were the original Blue Team and Red Team (but who knows, they could’ve been the fifteenth time this was tried, and perhaps they were chosen as a group because somebody at Project Freelancer was having a chuckle- “Hey, you know how that one guy named Donut is a Red rookie? I just found a file of some dude named CRONUT! Can you believe it? Let’s make him Red too!”). Or, Temple was the one BS-ing. He definitely doesn’t mind making things up and changing the narrative to suit his needs (Captain Gaslight over here). He very possibly could have found out the truth, and either decided to create a lie to tell to the other Blues and Reds so they would feel more “important”, thus more willing to help him with revenge. He also might have just rejected whatever facts he discovered, and lied so much he convinced HIMSELF that they were first.

Another option; time-travel being wonky. We’ve seen Wyoming and Gary use a time-distortion device that allows Wyoming to retry events until he likes the outcome (also, the possible situation with Church and the others being “exploded to the future”. because they wind up back in Blood Gulch later, we know that isn’t entirely accurate... but there’s a chance they could have actually been sent to another time, and then pulled back when Church “fixed” it by being with them, only they didn’t notice. Gary was also revealed to be the Deceit AI, so the many decades he spent with Church were probably a little exaggerated... but even if half the things Church lived through were simulations moving at an accelerated rate, he still did SOMETHING). Eventually, everybody meets more AI who are so advanced and powerful they are the equivalent of TIME GODS. The whole story with the time paradoxes got kicked-off because Loco was working on a “time door” (which Temple was presumably going to use to save Biff). Who knows where or how Loco even figured out how to DO that. Temple wanted revenge, and went on a whole killing-spree about it, but what gave him the idea that he could change the past and get Biff back? Maybe they already traveled through time somehow and were themselves some sort of paradox

Third option; an AI experiment. This one is the most “out there” and unreasonable, but still kinda interesting. They way the Director and Councilor were watching the Blues and Reds, and the fact that it is implied Alpha went through multiple simulations where he thought various people were dying because of him, possibly suggests that this whole group were some kind of experiment originally used to torture Alpha, but were then “recycled” into another function. I’d argue they aren’t more Fragments of Alpha, but other artificial intelligence programs designs to literally BE Sim Troopers. How did they adopt personalities and names so similar to the people from Blood Gulch? Especially since Alpha was GONE from Project Freelancer at that point? Possibly a combination of data gathered by VIC (and some of it being corrupted, thus the slightly “wrong” names), and possible information collected from Epsilon’s memories of Alpha. Roll with this scenario (however ridiculous it is)- these AI programs originally have no specific or set names, just random ones for each simulation. After Alpha was implanted into a human host, some jerk at Project Freelancer was like “Hey, can we do that again?”, so they stick these AI in a group of unfortunate Sim Troopers. Initially, they have no sense of self or identity, but they do the Blue VS Red thing, etc. At some point, they get new input, data they were never meant to have. It describes what has happened to Alpha since he became some dude named Church, and all the others kind of just... imprint on certain Reds and Blues. “I’m like that guy... no wait, that guy is like ME”. This also unlocks various memories of the simulations. The fight between Tex and Carolina had never been “real”, it was part of the virtual experiment (also, they never really had a Biff. he “died” in their simulation, and never became part of group when they were put into human bodies... there’s also something there about Biff having “a girl back home”, just like Jimmy). The Blues and Reds have human bodies, but the original minds of these soldiers have been erased, and now these AI consider themselves to be the real people (I do indeed think this is unlikely and doesn’t work, but I figured I might as well explain the thought)

Why the Blues and Reds don’t work

On a fundamental level, the Blues and Reds don’t work. The conceit for these characters is that they were the original Sim troopers. These are the guys that the Reds and Blues were based off of. But if you look at what canon actually shows instead of what it says, this doesn’t hold up even slightly.

There are a few characters in the Blues and Reds that do work. I’m sure you know which ones I’m talking about. It’s Temple, Loco, and Biff. And it would be easy to say well, they have more characterization, that’s why people like them. While this is true to an extent, it is actually just a symptom of the problem, not the reason for the problem. Temple, Loco, and Biff can exist on their own without their Red and Blue counterparts. If they were in a story where Reds and Blues did not exist, they would still make sense as characters. The other Blues and Reds do not have this quality. if you were to remove them from the show, Bucky, Cronut, Surge, and Lorenzo would not make sense as characters. (Gene is a special case we’ll get to later).

The reason that Sarge is who he is, and why his name is what it is, is because he is a sergeant who has made that his entire personality. War has completely taken over his life to the point that it is his identity. This is a complete story, this is a complete character. The reason that Surge is what he is is because what he is is like Sarge. Surge’s name doesn’t mean anything outside of it being similar to Sarge. Surge doesn’t have any qualities except for the fact that he is like Sarge. If you took Sarge away, Surge wouldn’t be anything. We’re supposed to believe that Sarge he was chosen because he’s like Surge, but Surge doesn’t have any characteristics for Sarge to be chosen off of. All of his characteristics are instead just based off of Sarge.

And this problem persists with all the problem Blues and Reds. Though Donut doesn’t have an in-universe reason to have his name, he does have an out-of-universe one. Donut, as well as Caboose, had their names picked from the default names that were offered from the original Xbox live service. Cronut‘s name was chosen because it’s similar to Donut. There is no reason for his name, except for the fact that it’s like Donut. Similarly, if Donut was supposed to be chosen based off Cronut, this doesn’t make sense. Because Donut’s personality was not originally like Cronut’s; it developed over time. Cronut is written to be based off of Donut’s later season personality, rather than Donut having been chosen because he acts like Cronut.

Tucker’s name doesn’t have a reason for existing like Sarge or Donut’s do but Buckey’s name is still boring as hell. The only reason his name is Buckey is because it sounds like Tucker. It’s based on Tucker. Tucker’s catchphrase of “bow chicka bow wow” is a commonly used mimicry of the stereotypical kind of music used in porn. It’s an actual thing that makes sense both in and out of universe. Buckey’s catchphrase of “boom chicka wah wah” is nothing. That doesn’t mean anything. The only reason that it’s that is because it is based off of Tucker’s catchphrase. It doesn’t work without Tucker existing. Buckey doesn’t work without Tucker existing.

Lorenzo just doesn’t make any sense at all with established canon. It is confirmed in season six that having robots is not standard for Sim Trooper bases, and the only reason that the Reds and Blues have them is because Church was there. Further, Lopez did not originally speak Spanish. He was not originally made to speak Spanish. The reason he speaks Spanish is because Sarge made a mistake putting his speech chip. If Lopez was supposed to be based on Lorenzo, he would’ve been speaking a different language from the beginning. But Lopez wasn’t made to be based on Lorenzo, Lorenzo with written to be based on Lopez. Lorenzo just shouldn’t exist based on established canon.

And although I think Loco’s character works well, there is a problem with his design. The reason that caboose has an alternate helmet is because in season six he didn’t upgrade to Mk. VI and instead downgraded to Mk. V. There’s no reason that Loco should have the same helmet as Caboose, especially not back in Desert Gulch. The only reason Loco has that helmet is because he’s based on Caboose. If Caboose was chosen because he was similar to Lock, he would’ve had the helmet from the beginning. But he didn’t. Because he wasn’t chosen based on Loco, Loco was just written to be similar to Caboose.

And there are potential ways to explain the discrepancies, to hand wave away the problems with continuity, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the Blues and Reds were written to be knock off version of the Reds and Blues, while canon is trying to tell you that the opposite is true.

Lastly, to talk about Gene, who you would think is the worst offender of this but who I don’t actually have a problem with. Because that’s the joke. The whole point of Gene is that he’s exactly like Simmons. While the other Blues and Reds are supposed to be their own characters that just happened to be similar to the Red and Blues, the joke is that Gene and Simmons are so similar that they’re basically the same person. And this works from a comedy and a thematic perspective, which I will get to in a later post where talk about parallels and narrative foils and such. But for now I will just leave it here by saying Gene does actually work.

#red vs blue

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ranaysdn4005 · 8 years ago

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Attempting To Collect Quotes/Content for My Term Project

It’s been really hard staying on track with book design without class critiques ☹️... But thank goodness that’s over with. As the title says, I’ve attempted to collect some quotes from the books I was interested in showing in my Term Project. I’ll probably update this later if/when I get excerpts from news articles, as I had planned to do. I had a lot of trouble getting page numbers or getting a hold of some ebooks or physical books to refer to... so I’ll have to cite the book itself and figure out how to get my hands on page numbers (If I can at all...).

I also had trouble figuring out a name/title for the theme sections... I will cross out the ones that I am not leaning towards (if there is a selection).

Escapism - “Fahrenheit 451″ by Ray Bradbury

"The small crystal bottle of sleeping tablets which earlier today had been filled with thirty capsules and which now lay uncapped and empty in the light of the tiny flare" (p.14)

“Will you turn the parlour off?” He asked. “That’s my family.” (49)

“My ‘family’ is people. They tell me things: I taught, they laugh! And the colours!” (73)

“Nobody listens anymore. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me, I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

Fascism/Control/Authority - “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis

“He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

“He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.”

When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

Surveillance - “Nineteen-Eighty Four” by George Orwell

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. (1.1.4)

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (1.5.65)

He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. (1.7.22)

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. (1.1.6)

Superintelligence - “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke

Hal: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

"I want to do this myself, Hal," he said. "Please give me control."

"Look, Dave, you've got a lot of things to do. I suggest you leave this to me."

"Hal, switch to manual hibernation control."

"I can tell from your voice harmonics, Dave, that you're badly upset. Why don't you take a stress pill and get some rest?"

"Hal, I am in command of this ship. I order you to release the manual hibernation control."

"I'm sorry, Dave, but in accordance with special subroutine C1435-dash-4, quote, When the crew are dead or incapacitated, the onboard computer must assume control, unquote. I must, therefore, overrule your authority, since you are not in any condition to exercise it intelligently."

"Hal," said Bowman, now speaking with an icy calm. "I am not incapacitated. Unless you obey my instructions, I shall be forced to disconnect you."

"I know you have had that on your mind for some time now, Dave, but that would be a terrible mistake. I am so much more capable than you are of supervising the ship, and I have such enthusiasm for the mission and confidence in its success."

"Listen to me very carefully, Hal. Unless you release the hibernation control immediately and follow every order I give from now on, I'll go to Central and carry out a complete disconnection."

Hal's surrender was as total as it was unexpected.

The tools they had been programmed to use were simple enough, yet they could change this world and make the man-apes its masters. (4.1)

They both knew, of course, that Hal was hearing every word, but they could not help these polite circumlocutions. Hal was their colleague, and they did not wish to embarrass him. (23.27)

It was beyond all reason that Hal, who had performed flawlessly for so long, should suddenly turn assassin. (26.12)

Modernization/Automation/Superhuman - “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley

"That's because we don't allow them to be like that. We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don't permit their magnesium-calcium ratio to fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusion of young blood. We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don't look like that. Partly," he added, "because most of them die long before they reach this old creature's age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end." (7.22)

No, we can't rejuvenate. But I'm very glad," Dr. Shaw had concluded, "to have had this opportunity to see an example of senility in a human being. Thank you so much for calling me in." He shook Bernard warmly by the hand. (11.13)

"For of course," said Mr. Foster, "in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundred–that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course one must always have an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally. The others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course. Result: they're decanted as freemartins–structurally quite normal (except," he had to admit, "that they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last," continued Mr. Foster, "out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention."

He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn't content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.

"We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future ..." He was going to say "future World controllers," but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries," instead.

The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile.

"‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God."

"What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder."

"It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."

Cyberspace - “Neuromancer” by William Gibson

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin [1] hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched [2] between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

`Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...'

"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?" "Things aren't different. Things are things." (24.30-31)

Degradation/ Deterioration - “The Sheep Look Up” by John Brunner

“Take it for granted that the government will disregard long-term dangers-such as those affecting the environment-in order to cling to power; that the citizenry will do the same because thinking is too much like hard work; and then the handful of Cassandras are proved right, they will be held to blame and very likely stoned or shot.”

“What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.”

“The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!”

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techscopic · 8 years ago

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Glasswing Ventures announces Connect Council

When I first heard about the Connect Council, I was intrigued. I knew Rudina Seseri and Glasswing Ventures, and knew they didn’t have a reputation for doing things half way. When I heard about the mission of the Connect Council and the people involved, I was more than intrigued, I was impressed. What follows is a quick Q&A with Rudina about the council.

What is the Connect Council?

It is the first of three advisory councils to support and extend Glasswing Ventures’ investment strategy. Collectively, these councils bring together 40 renowned entrepreneurs and technologists, AI visionaries, and world-leading executives to exclusively advise and support the firm and its portfolio companies. The Connect Council is a critical part of the Glasswing Ventures’ DNA, extending our strength in providing AI expertise and advice exponentially amplifying the firm’s and our portfolio companies’ competitive edge. The Connect Council is comprised of two working groups: the AI & Academic Group, and the Business Leadership Group. Today, we are announcing the AI & Academic Group.

Who is on it?

A group of extraordinary individuals who have been lending their support to us since the founding of Glasswing over 18 months ago – we are grateful to them and very happy to announce that the members of the Glasswing’s Connect Council – the AI & Academic Group include:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Professor at MIT and Oxford University and winner of the ACM A.M. Turing Prize

Dr. Brad Berens, Chief ‫Strategy Officer at the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg and Principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting

Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, Inc.

Dr. Thomas R. Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship

Dr. Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, MIT Professor and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program Director

Dr. Manuela Veloso, Herbert A. Simon University Professor and Head of Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Peter Weinstock, Executive Director and Anesthesia Endowed Chair of the Boston Children’s Hospital Simulator Program and Associate Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School

Why did you start it?

We started the Councils as we know that they can bring tremendous scale to the firm as we help harness the positive potential of AI across industries and markets. Because the Connect Council is a collaborative and vibrant body composed of the most influential thought leaders and innovators in academia and AI technology today — our team, our founders and portfolio companies, gain access to a brilliant collective of luminaries at the forefront of AI and innovation, who are committed to fueling its success and growth. These visionaries have extensive experience across AI, academia, startups and Fortune 500 companies. They are the catalysts in extending our reach, supporting our portfolio companies and advising us, and helping Glasswing become a cornerstone of the AI ecosystem. They also play a pivotal role in helping bring AI to its full potential in the broader ecosystem and society at large.

What do you hope to accomplish with it?

Our council members are a resource for candid views and discussions about new technology trends, opportunities and talent in AI – they aren’t just big names and faces on a website. We won’t agree all of the time — and that’s exactly what we hope for. In fact, it’s beautiful when we brainstorm together, as that is when the best outcomes emerge. Our portfolio startups, and many more in the ecosystem, will be able to benefit first-hand from these brainstorms and the brilliance and experience of our advisors.

We have a symbiotic relationship with our advisory council members. They enhance the value we add to founders and companies, well beyond smart capital. At the same time, through their affiliation with Glasswing, they are part of a platform that is developing and shaping the next generation of AI leaders and technology companies. It is because of this mutually beneficial dynamic that our advisors work with us on an exclusive basis.

How will you know if it is working? Any metrics you are tracking?

Our Connect Council members are catalysts in extending our reach, supporting our portfolio companies and advising us, and helping Glasswing become a cornerstone of the AI ecosystem. They also play a pivotal role in helping bring AI to its full potential in the broader ecosystem and society at large. Being as exclusive and engaged as they are, their inbounds — whether it is bringing in a unique deal flow or helping with diligence or key talent are part of the tremendous value they bring to us.

Is AI really as big as the hype suggests?

Artificial Intelligence has been at the forefront of tech innovation for some time, but 2017 has been the year in which it has truly taken center stage. In a world of pervasive connectivity, AI is essential to harnessing the power of data. Companies have to create an AI advantage to survive — Google, Facebook, Amazon and countless startups know this and are betting their businesses on it – in fact, startups are becoming major value creators.

AI is already changing many aspects of our daily lives both at home and at work. However, this is just the start. AI is steadily and pervasively redefining our relationship with technology, enhancing human capacity and, fundamentally, how we live. It is big – and it’s going to be bigger than we imagined it.

Rudina Seseri is founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures. With over 15 years of investing and transactional experience, Rudina has led technology investments and acquisitions in startup companies in the fields of robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), SaaS marketing technologies and digital media. Rudina’s portfolio investments include Talla, Celtra, CrowdTwist, Jibo and SocialFlow. Rudina has been appointed by the Dean of the Harvard Business School (HBS) for a fourth consecutive year to serve as Entrepreneur-In-Residence for the Business School and as Executive-In-Residence for Harvard University’s innovation-Lab. She is also a Member of the Business Leadership Council of Wellesley College. Rudina also serves as Advisor for L’Oreal USA Women in Digital, as Director on the Board of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) and on the Board of Overseers for Boston Children’s Hospital. She has been named a 2017 Boston Business Journal Power 50: Newsmaker, a 2014 Women to Watch honoree by Mass High Tech and a 2011 Boston Business Journal 40-under-40 honoree for her professional accomplishments and community involvement. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Economics and International Relations and with an MBA from the Harvard Business School (HBS). She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Epsilon honor societies.

Glasswing Ventures announces Connect Council syndicated from http://ift.tt/2wBRU5Z

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