#is this scenario based on RL experience?

[four-bastard-bustle]

Real quick I just wanna say I love your version of the guys sm they’re literally so good I can not get over them :33

I know youve mentioned a few times throughout the blog that Tom and Tord end up infiltrating the Red Army base and stuff and Ive always been curious if you have any ideas about it or anything??

Sadly I've got no like big scenarios planned out, just a couple of snippets and the broad strokes of this.

It'd be a good while after Tord had come back to the UK and they'd figured out he had an evil clone on the loose. I don't even know how they'd find the base, allthough it would be really funny if they just randomly stumbled upon it while walking through the city or something and arguing about something. Some kinda "well it's not like we can just go kill your evil clone like that we don't even know where the base is (said while passing a building brightly labelled as Secret Evil Base For The Red Army)" scenario.

I am also thinking about that moment from hello hellhole where Tord throws the disk in the air and Tom just catches is, I've always found that a really interesting little bit that makes me feel like the two of them can actually work together really well as long as they're not like Thinking About It as teamwork, y'know? And i want this to have that vibe, like, they just compliment each other perfectly as they rip and tear through the army soldiers. Sort of like that one post i reblogged, Tord would have a glass canon vibe while Tom is the tanky guy taking most of the hits with his thick skin.

Allthough eventually Tord gets knocked out and dragged away or something cause I imagine him ending up tied up in Red Leader's office. Just him and his way cooler copy gazing down at him with nothing but hatred in his eyes. Very scary!

Red Leader does like a good ol villain monologue about his plans to take over the world and his revenge for what the dirdum lane boys did to him. In my Version of th* *nd there's no big angst or anything, they just saw the robot on their lawn as they came back from fishing and Edd immediately blew it up with a beam. So Red Leader talks about the green man and how he's ruined everything and will always come back to ruin his plans and so he's going to kill Edd once and for all.

And THAT gets Tord to take the whole thing even more seriously. He's lucky this guy hadn't hurt his friends yet but the open admission he plans to do so, With His Face, made his blood run cold and also boil at the same time. Some kind of Extreme Friendship Instinct kicks in and Tord breaks out of his restraints and him n RL have a bit of a cool fight but there's no intent to keep it going to look cool, there's only the intent to KILL from both of them. I'm also imagining right now that RL Will Not Shut Up during this whole thing about his plans and how nice it'll be to be the copy that bests the original. Tord fucking hates it, he's such a quiet guy and here's his evil clone that just talks and talks and talks and it's so fucking annoying.

Just had a brain blast about RL's death, because the original concept was just that Tord shoots him, but since I'm going for this overall effect of Tom and Tord becoming actual friends from this maybe Tom manages to fight his way through to Tord and they do some kind of coordinated duo attack to kill RL in a slightly humorous yet still pretty cool fashion. Hm something to chew on.

Either way they get him and go out to celebrate and by the end of the day they're finally friends because killing the evil guy who was menacing the people they both care about the most is a great bonding experience <3

[toptipsai]

Deep Reinforcement Learning: Unraveling the Neural Networks

The advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been a pivotal milestone in the journey of artificial intelligence. This hybrid approach, merging the perception capabilities of deep learning with the decision-making prowess of reinforcement learning (RL), has opened up new frontiers in AI. In this article, we will delve deep into the world of DRL, explore various neural network architectures, and understand their impact on experiential learning. The Convergence of Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning At the heart of DRL lies the integration of deep neural networks into the RL framework. This marriage enables agents to process complex, high-dimensional sensory inputs and make informed decisions based on them. Core Concept: - RL involves an agent learning to make decisions through trial and error, guided by rewards. - Deep learning provides the tools to interpret vast and complex data, a feat that was unattainable with traditional RL algorithms. Practical Example: - Consider an AI learning to play a video game. The game’s screen provides visual input, a high-dimensional data, which the agent must interpret to decide its next move. A deep neural network can process these visual cues, allowing the agent to understand and interact with the game effectively. Key Algorithms in Deep Reinforcement Learning - Deep Q-Networks (DQN): - Pioneered by DeepMind, DQN integrates convolutional neural networks with Q-learning. - Application: Used in playing Atari games, where the screen's pixel data served as input. - Policy Gradient Methods: - These methods focus on directly optimizing the policy (the agent's strategy) rather than estimating the value of actions. - Example: Algorithms like REINFORCE, where the policy is updated based on the gradient of expected rewards. - Actor-Critic Methods: - These combine the benefits of policy optimization and value estimation. - Notable Implementation: Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) which uses multiple agents to gather diverse experience. Code Snippet: Basic Policy Gradient import tensorflow as tf model = tf.keras.Sequential(), tf.keras.layers.Dense(num_actions, activation='softmax') ]) optimizer = tf.keras.optimizers.Adam(learning_rate=0.01) huber_loss = tf.keras.losses.Huber() action_probs = model(state) loss = huber_loss(action_taken, action_probs) grads = tape.gradient(loss, model.trainable_variables) optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(grads, model.trainable_variables)) Neural Network Architectures in DRL - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): - Ideal for processing visual information. - Usage: In DQN for interpreting pixel data from video game screens. - Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and LSTMs: - Useful for tasks requiring memory of past actions or states. - Application: In scenarios like text-based games or where temporal sequences are critical. - Transformers: - Although newer, transformers are being explored in DRL for their effectiveness in handling sequential data. Challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning - Sample Efficiency: - DRL algorithms often require a large amount of data (experiences) to learn effectively. - Stability and Convergence: - The training process can be unstable, especially when using function approximators like neural networks. - Generalization: - An ongoing challenge is ensuring that DRL agents can generalize learning from one scenario to others. >> You may also like: The Future of Artificial Intelligence: A Journey with OpenAI - - From board games like Go to complex multiplayer online games, DRL has been used to achieve superhuman performance. - - DRL aids in teaching robots to perform complex tasks like grasping and manipulation. - - For decision-making in dynamic and unpredictable environments. - - Personalized medicine, where DRL algorithms can help in creating treatment regimes. Read the full article

[handicappedbuenchico]

🖊 — any tattoos? 😍 — celebrity crush(es)?🤔 — what genre(s)/theme(s) do you struggle to write the most?

🖊 — any tattoos?

Nope! Getting a tattoo is one of those things that I've thought about, don't get me wrong! I just...I have sensory issues related to being touched, especially with sharp objects like needles, and that combined with my low pain tolerance would make the whole 'getting a tattoo' experience like a real form of hell for me, ya know? Besides that, I wouldn't even know what I would want to have tattooed on me, or even where I would put a tattoo.

😍 — celebrity crush(es)?

☝🏻🫣Do...Do I have to continue on with this answer? I mean LOOK AT THIS MAN??? B.reckin M.eyer was my first and only celebrity crush, even before I knew I was a lesbian. Now that I am a proud lesbian, I can say that he is my ONLY male exception, like he could do just about anything with or to me and I would enthusiastically agree and thank him. I'm also talking any era B.reckin M.eyer, idc if it's Greg Randazzo, Jon Arbuckle, Travis Birkenstock, or even my boy Ted Lockwood, I will smash and date every single time. It's also a funny coincidence that on the first of this month, I revealed publicly on this account that I had a crush on B.reckin, and now you essentially just asked me to self-report again lmaoooo thank you Ed. (also finding that GIF was a happy accident, but I'm also not complaining 🫣🫣🫣)

🤔 — what genre(s)/theme(s) do you struggle to write the most?

Ah the genres/themes I struggle with the most... this should be fun. Now, I know that this is going to seem quite unbelievable, given that a lot of my writing has been revolving around these two genres lately, but for me writing erotica and romance is a struggle. I think it's because those two genres encapsulate RL experiences that I have yet to have, and it really makes me cringe when that lack of experience shows in my writing. For reference, it's one of the reasons I had to stop doing K.inktober after like, the sixth day. ((This also may or may not be an explanation as to why all those NSFW gif memes sitting in my askbox are gonna take a while to be responded to, ty for patience and I'm sorry 💀)) In terms of themes that I struggle with, I tend to struggle with themes revolving around coming-of-age, as I didn't really get to experience such a thing. My childhood and teenage years kind of just..passed me by with little to no fanfare? I didn't experience anything that Hollywood tricked me into believing I would. I mean, I also grew up poor yo-yoing between a major city's nicer section to it's ghettos so 💀💀💀 Another theme I tend to struggle with are ones based around morality. Now, I have a concrete thought process, and I tend to see most situations in black and white. I'm sure that, just by that description of how my mind tends to operate alone, you can see why morality as a theme tends to be a struggle for me. Morality isn't always black and white, sometimes there's patches of grey nuance. Sometimes people do objectively bad things for good reasons, sometimes the reverse of that is true. My brain struggling to see those little specks of grey in all the black and white makes writing those kind of scenarios a struggle and a half.

[theinternetisfulloftrash]

Can you please do ❛ you better watch your fucking mouth with Dylan?? And we’re all ready to be destroyed by the Dylan smut trashy 😉

OhhHhHHhH ShiIiItTttTttT

This sounds like it's gonna drag me down a naughty trail. I never really know though, so let's find out together! Warnings for smut. These are smut prompts ;)

P.S. I got this same prompt for Stiles, so I hope the anon that requested it is okay if it's for Dylan <3

P.P.S. I still have a few requests sitting in my inbox that I will eventually write, but this is the last one I'll be doing until I get the next chapter of FAFLA done :)

Prompt list HERE

Steamy Stary Night

A cool night, a hot soak, and even hotter company. What could be better? You know those moments where you think real life actually has a chance at measuring up to fantasy? This was one of those times. You were still in the house wrapped up tight in a fluffy white robe, looking out at Dylan on the stone patio taking the cover off the hot tub. He had a towel slung low around his waist, but you knew there was nothing underneath.

You were desperate already. You made it too easy for him, but you didn't care. You could count on one finger the number of times you'd actually made him really work for it. You sighed as you tipped your head, staring at the round curve of his ass as he bent over to set the cover down.

He dusted off his hands and turned to the house. To you. He smiled in that perfectly sexy lopsided way that he knows undoes you and beckoned you with a curled index finger.

You smiled back, slid open the patio door, and stepped outside.

The air was brisk, a slight breeze licked goosebumps up your arms from your exposed wrists to your shoulders. The sun had long set, and the hazy deep blue of the sky above was speckled with only a few of the galaxy's brightest stars, those vibrant enough to fight off the bright lights of L.A.

"Don't you look cozy," Dylan hummed, looking you up and down as he walked toward you. He opened his arms and you stepped into them.

"So do you..." you said, resting your cheek against his bare chest while he wrapped you up in a tender hug.

He pressed a kiss into your hair and then another to your forehead before you pulled back from him to look up into his eyes. He brushed an errant hair that had fallen out of the messy bun on your head behind your ear. His tongue wet his lips before he reached up to cup your cheeks in his palms.

God. He could still make your stomach flutter with the way he looked at you before a kiss. The way his warm eyes softly flick between yours? The flutter of his long lashes that accompanied the few languid blinks before he leaned in? He weaponized that shit. It was enough to make you feel like a silly schoolgirl with a crush on the boy in math class two rows over.

The kiss was as satisfyingly perfect as they all were. The way he held you, the way he leaned into it with his whole body, the soft exhaled little moans he offered when you kissed him back in earnest, all of it made you feel like a lottery winner. How did you get so lucky? What in the hell did you do in a past life to deserve this? You must have been a goddamn Saint.

His large hands splayed across your lower back when he finally pulled away from your kiss. "Come on," he said with a smirk, taking your hand in his and leading you toward the spa that was billowing with steam.

He'd taken the time to turn on the hanging lights that draped across the fence on the far side of the yard, and a few candles sat lit on the patio next to the tub. There was a bottle of wine in an ice bucket next to them along with two crystal glasses.

Letting go of your hand, he walked around to the step into the spa and unfurled the corner of his towel, letting it drop to his feet. The glow of the water and steam lit his perfectly naked body and it sent an electric little ripple through you.

You watched as he sank down into the water, the surface of it lapped against his waist just above his navel as he stood in the deepest part of the hot tub. "Gonna leave me in here all alone, huh?" he hummed, smiling up at you, holding out his hand.

You looped your finger into the tie of your robe and undid the loose knot. You curled into it one last time before you slid it off your shoulders and let it fall to the ground.

The little appreciative sound of Dylan's breath catching in his throat made you blush. His hungry gaze roamed over you and the swell of warmth it sent through you had you feeling like you were already soaking in the hot water.

You stepped down into the tub and took his hand.

He guided you to a seat and then leaned over the edge of the tub to fill the two glasses of wine. Then, he drifted back over to you, handing you one as he settled into the seat next to you.

"Such a nice night..." he whispered, resting his head on the headrest of the corner seat, and then took a long sip of his wine.

You nodded in agreement, looking at him rather than the sky. "Beautiful."

The two of you sat together, hands entwined beneath the surface of the gently bubbling water. Neither of you felt the need to speak as you just soaked in the warmth of each other's presence that was so perfectly complemented by the soothing water.

When you'd both finished your wine and set the glasses aside, Dylan grinned and pulled you into him until you were gliding up into his lap in the large corner seat of the tub.

You were straddled over his thighs, relishing the way it felt when his hands glided down from your waist to cup your ass before he gave it a firm and needy squeeze. You ground down into him a little before he leaned forward and captured your lips in his.

The kiss was hungry, it had an aggressive edge. He nipped and sucked on your lower lip, his greedy hands roaming and groping what he could reach.

You softly moaned his name when he separated his mouth from yours long enough to allow it, and the reaction you felt ripple through was so fucking intoxicating.

His fingertips dug into your skin as his grip tightened, and the low little growl he made before he latched onto the pulse point of your throat to leave a dusky little mark made you feel like the last meal of a death row prisoner. It was empowering to know you could undo him too. That he might want you almost as desperately as you always wanted him. Almost.

You knotted your fingers into his hair and sighed at the way his stubbled cheeks roughed up the skin of your shoulder and throat. The feeling of his tongue tracing up the tendon of your neck made you shudder. You rolled your hips into him, feeling how hard he was when he rutted up between your legs. Your head fell back and you looked up at the night sky. At the moon and those tenacious little stars, seeing a few more when Dylan's teeth gnashed and nipped at your throat.

"Mmm," he hummed, sucking a last little kiss into your skin before he looked up at you. His lips were glistening and plump and curled up in a devious little smirk. His grip on you loosened enough for you to sneak out of his grasp.

It was your turn to do a little damage. "Stand up," you said, crouching in front of him in the middle of the tub.

"But...but it's cold out there..." Dylan whined, smiling as he floated toward you a bit.

You moved back out of his reach. "I'll make it worth it..." you whispered, before your lips spread into a mischievous smile.

Dylan's eyes narrowed a bit, and his lips hung parted for a moment before he spoke. "Yeah?"

You nodded. "Promise."

Dylan huffed out the tiniest little laugh, his tongue prodding at the inside of his lower lip, brows flashing up his forehead. Then he rose up out of the water, steam rippling the air around his skin as it cooled in the evening air.

You couldn't help but stare. The water ran down his body, pooling a bit in his belly button before it spilled down into the coarse hair beneath it. When he leaned against the edge of the tub, your eyes roamed over his length, the feeling of thirst overwhelming you as you watched the water dripping from its tip.

"Not gettin' any warmer here," he teased.

You shook your head and drifted back into his space, settling on your knees on the seat in front of him. You leaned in close and let out a long breath along the length of him before you paused at his tip. "Shut up," you whispered before you sealed your lips around him.

Dylan's hand moved from where it had been resting on the edge of the tub alongside his hip to cup your ear. "Shit..." he breathed out in appreciation, his fingers knotting into the damp hair on the back of your head.

You smiled around him, pleased with yourself, knowing how good he felt when his erection flexed a bit in your mouth. Then you took him deeper, pressing your tongue to the vein as you sucked your cheeks. You relaxed your throat and slowly took him all the way to the base.

"H—Holy fuck..." he stuttered, his grip in your hair tightening, holding you in place while his hips thrust forward just the tiniest bit. "So good..."

When you felt the tension in his fingers ease, you pulled back up his length and then dipped forward again, increasing the pace as your tongue traced little patterns on the thick vein that pulsed beneath his length with each pass of your lips.

"You're...gonna make...make me cum," he whispered, his thumb tracing along your cheek.

You pulled away enough to speak. "That's kinda the point..." you teased, flicking your tongue along the slit of him, savouring the salty taste.

Dylan let out a little laugh that was choked off when you sucked the tip of him back into your mouth. "But... I wanna fuck you first..."

Those words sent a ripple of pleasure through your body. Your lips trembled and you looked up at him.

Dylan smiled and gripped himself in his palm before he pulled free of your lips with a little pop. Then he took your hand in his and pulled you up out of the water and into a bruising kiss. His tongue pushed into your mouth and you kissed him back with just as much determination to please.

With a final greedy nip at your lower lip, his hands gripped tightly at your waist and he swapped your positions and then spun you around so your back was pressed against his chest. He held you to his body, his lips ghosting along the shell of your ear, his length prodding at your low back.

"You gonna make me feel good?" you asked, turning your head toward him, looking up at him as you wet your lips.

"Mhm," he hummed, rolling his hips into you as his hand kneaded at one of your breasts.

Your eyes fluttered closed. "Gonna fuck me?"

"Yes."

You smiled, letting your head fall back against his shoulder. "What the fuck are you waiting for then?"

Dylan let out a breathy little laugh in your ear. "You better watch your fuckin' mouth..."

"Or what?"

"Or...I'm gonna make you scream so goddamn loud you wake the fuckin' neighbours."

You groaned and rolled your head against his collarbone. "Fuck the neighbours..."

Dylan licked a long line up the side of your throat before he tensed and grabbed your wrist, pushing you away enough to pin it to your lower back before he bent you forward over the edge of the hot tub, water sloshing out over the stone patio that was flush with it.

You splayed your free hand out in front of you and looked back at him over your shoulder.

"You're fuckin' shameless..." he said, as you watched him grip himself in his strong hand and line himself up with your entrance.

You grinned and braced yourself before you said what you knew would provoke him. "And you're still not fucking me..."

The little snarl that curled his lip before he slammed himself into you was one of those perfect little microexpressions that nearly drove you insane. His grip on your wrist that he still had pinned behind you was almost painfully tight. He rolled his hips when he was buried all the way inside you, his body flush with yours.

"Better?" he said before he pulled out and fucked into you again.

"Fuck!" you gasped, your fingertips curling around one of the rough stones of the patio, your cheek falling to rest on the back of your hand.

"That a yes?" he asked, unmoving.

You pressed back into him in a silent plea for him to keep going, but he remained still.

"Uh uh..." he reprimanded. "If you want it so bad, I want you to beg for it..."

You heard him draw in a sharp breath, his fingers around your wrist opening and then gripping tightly again. "Dylan..."

"Dylan, what?"

"Please, Dylan..." You swallowed the tension that had your mouth watering and tightened yourself around his length, squeezing him inside you before you gave him what he wanted. "Please...fuck me."

He practically growled out a breath as he released his punishing grip on your wrist and grabbed your waist in his hands before he started thrusting into you so hard and fast it took your breath away.

You braced yourself on the edge of the tub, gasping out his name and half-formed expletives as each jolt of his hips pushed you closer and closer to the sweet release you were starving for.

"Mmm," he hummed, one hand reaching up to grab your breast and pinch your nipple before he gripped it tightly over your shoulder so he could fuck you even deeper.

"Holy shit!" you called out as the slight change in angle had each one of his thrusts driving right into your g-spot.

"That's right...scream for me..." he praised before he spanked your ass so hard you knew the red welt in the shape of his perfect hand would be there long enough for you to appreciate it later.

His pace quicked when you started letting out a near-constant stream of moaned curses between the sloshes of water that were spilling out and soaking your hands. He was close to, you could feel it in his rhythm, hear it in the catches in his breath, and you wanted to pull him right over the edge with you.

"Dyl—" you gasped, feeling the first threads of your release starting to unravel. "Please...I'm gonna come!" You looked back over your shoulder at him, desperate to see his face, to see if he was as gone as you felt.

He moaned your name, his stuttered thrusts becoming so erratic you knew he was right there. "Me too...fuc— Gnh!"

The feeling of him spilling into you, of his jarring hips, and the sound of his gasped cries of your name did you in. You came so hard you thought you might blackout. Little blue specks of light flashed across your vision as you spiraled through the throes of release, all the while Dylan was still gently fucking himself through his own.

When the two of you finally separated and slid back into the warm water next to each other, Dylan pulled you in under his arm and pressed a kiss into your hair, still a bit short of breath.

You reached up and pulled the hand that was looped over your shoulder to your lips to press a kiss to it. "I think you might have been the one to wake the neighbours," you teased.

He chuckled, looking down at you. "Fuck the neighbours."

[feverhalo]

Imagine a character having an anxiety event and feeling so spaced out, or sweating so bad, or their stomach is in awful knots and achy, their face is flushed red and feels so hot, and they feel dizzy or light headed. And they don't realize what it is and are worried they are getting ill and trying to check for a fever but theyre so preoccupied and dazed and maybe disoriented from whatever is happening to remember to read the thermometer ir to find it. Or the person they ask to check is drowned out by the haze of the event

Flipside: a character who is getting sick feels shivers/tremors and stomach knots and a cold sweat down their neck and its so much like their anxiety symptoms they separate themselves to a quiet space to do some mindfulness practice and to talk through to themselves to see what may have triggered the anxiety reaction, only to fall into a feverish doze and have the symptoms fade a bit because exhaustion was making them worse. They wake up with a shiver and realize its much too hot and they feel bone deep achy and unwell and realize its an oncoming flu or cold. But they have a nice feeling of satisfaction because they remembered the coping techniques and went right to them when they weren't sure if it was an attack or not

[potteresque-ire]

Here’s my response to @pussyibo, who tagged me on a post about Gg’s Li-Ning brand endorsement. 

First of all, I’d like everyone to please read @accio-victuuri‘s wonderfully written, detailedly researched post on the Li-Ning brand, the Xinjiang cotton support rally on Weibo, and the narrative the state has spun on the issue. I would’ve provided similar information in my response as well—although no way I could’ve laid it out as clearly, as to-the-point as @accio-victuuri did—because this background is critical in explaining my thoughts on this issue.

I haven’t reblogged the Li-Ning ads, but I must confess that the decision had little to do with politics. I’ve always leaned towards re-blogging art than real people.

That said, however, Gg’s Li-Ning ads have, of course, crossed my dash. And I’d be honest and say this as well: I haven’t really found them—or by extension, the idea that Gg was endorsing the brand—offensive, precisely for the reasons @accio-victuuri laid out. Li-Ning is a legend in China; a highly decorated olympic gymnast, he was the national pride chosen to be the final torch-bearer and torch-lighter for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His company, established in 1990, was among the first Chinese brands with name-recognition overseas and has won high-profile international sponsorships—rare achievements among Chinese-owned enterprises, even to this day. 

Based on Li Ning’s identity and his company being a National Brand, I’d be more surprise if the Li-Ning brand doesn’t use homegrown, “patriotic” cotton, before even considering the practical reasons—Xinjiang cotton being a domestic product that eliminates the costs of shipping, tariffs etc; that it’s of such superior quality that international brands touted its use—a reversal of the usual downplaying of their products’ Chinese origin, due to the common associations of “Made in China”=“Bootleg”,“awful quality”; that makes up ~20% of worldwide cotton production—ie. most Chinese families are probably already using products with cotton from the region (blankets, for example). 

From that perspective, therefore, I’ve viewed the endorsement as little more than a case of a high-profile Chinese celebrity endorsing a high-profile Chinese brand, named after a national hero and targeted towards the local market. I breathed a little sigh of relief for Gg, admittedly—imagine if his new endorsement over those same few days had been for a brand under the Better Cotton Initiative; he would’ve been flayed alive, if the antis’ words were knives.

(And who said they aren’t?)

As such, I also haven’t considered the Li-Ning brand as “morally inferior” to Gg or Dd, or, the other way around, that Gg or Dd are “morally superior” to the Li-Ning brand. I haven’t considered drawing a moral ruler along this axis. I either believe they’re all doing what their sociopolitical environment has taught them, guided them, demanded them to do, or I don’t. Li Ning (the person and the brand), Gg, and Dd all have a celebrity status attached to them. They’ve all flourished in that one sociopolitical environment—that one they also call home.  

Ultimately, Gg and Dd belong to China. They’re the product of the country, its all powerful, all controlling regime. No one can be isolated from their backgrounds—my background colours every word I say here; likewise, there’s no place I can draw a line and separate Gg and Dd from the Communist Red behind them. I wouldn’t have posted about China’s sociopolitical environment, researched on it as a GgDd fan otherwise. 

I either walk away from them all, or I don’t. I either stay a fan, or I don’t. The latter is my choice. Every minute.

Have there been instances in which news about Gg and Dd make me especially uncomfortable? Yes. Photos of Gg in PLA (People’s Liberation Army; Chinese army) uniform for AT, or Dd in police uniform for BAH, for TTXS still give me stomach churns every time I see them. A violent squeeze of the heart.

Visceral reactions that come from, I suppose, the amyglada. More organic, primitive than thought. 

I’ve seen those uniforms in RL action—uniforms worn by those who’re truly responsible for the labor camps and mass surveillance, the torture, the unreported deaths, the disappearances; uniforms Gg and Dd have expressed support outside their drama, their host roles:

Translation: #I support Hong Kong Police too# (On red banner) “I support HK police. You can beat me up now.” What a shame for Hong Kong.

(Dd reblogged the same post originated from People’s Daily, the State-Controlled Newspaper).

I’m going to go on a quick detour and provide the backstory of this red little box, this piece of propaganda that is much more blatant than a clothing ad. I’ll explain why in a bit.

Here’s an article that explained the incident from which the quote was drawn, that occurred on 8/13/2019 during the Hong Kong Protest and the airing of The Untamed. Essentially, a Chinese state media reporter was suspected to be a spy among the protestors after taking photos, refusing to show his press pass (he was found to have one but not his own), and possessing a “I love HK Police” shirt; he was tied to the luggage cart and beaten up. The reporter said the quote in the red little box; he suffered mild injuries and was soon discharged by the hospital.  What was the background of this story, however? Why did the protestors beat up someone who could be from the press—who, regardless of their affiliation, protestors know should be protected? The protests began in June, 2019. Hong Kong had had another large scale protest in between September to November, 2014 (aka the “Umbrella Revolution”). Spies had always been an issue. Why didn’t a spy beating happen earlier?

Here’s an English-subbed documentary (warning: violence) that offers insight of the background—the fear and fury of the protestors. The subject is what is now known as 721 Yuen Long incident, or the evening Hong Kongers—even those who had not been involved, who had been unsure about the protests—lost their trust of the Hong Kong Police, once known as “Asia’s finest”.

That evening went like this. On 7/21/2019, the local mafia violently attacked the passengers of a late night train in Yuen Long station—passengers who weren‘t protestors (who wore black)—while the police ignored the multiple emergency calls from locals who’d spotted something suspicious, and didn’t show up on the scene while the beatings occurred. Evidences, which the documentary detailed, pointed to the Hong Kong Police, and the government that backed it, endorsing the beatings, therefore working with the local mafia to deal with the protests. 

By 8/13/2019, therefore, protestors were convinced that their opposition wasn’t beyond using very low blows to get their way. One could argue that they overreacted to the spy-reporter; the Western media, who had long trusted HKers to know what they were doing, expressed its disappointment, and the protestors soon apologised. The Chinese propaganda machine, of course, jumped at the chance of casting the protestors as bad people, and the online rally on Weibo ensued (It lasted for at least three days; Gg and Dd reblogged post about HK between 8/14/2019-8/16/2019).

That was, briefly, the story behind Gg and Dd’s Weibo reblog.

Why did I make a detour and write up this story? Because I’ve actually posted blatant propaganda on my blog—the Weibo post, with its red little box. However, does it still feel like propaganda with the story?

Therefore, I haven’t, and don’t plan on pressuring anyone to stop posting and re-blogging specific pieces of GgDd information—be it an ad as in this scenario, or propaganda material from films, series, government/state-controlled media announcements etc. That I believe everyone should set their own boundaries, be their own judge of what they’d like to share on their own blog aside, I think—and this is where my opinion may deviate from many—“canceling” falsehoods often isn’t the best way to deal with them. 

This opinion is likely, again, coloured by my background.

My observations have been this: “cancelling” is effective only if the cancelling force is, overall, significantly stronger than the force being cancelled. In the scenario that prompted this post, making Gg’s Li-Ning ads disappear from the dash is only possible if there are more fans who ignore the ads than those who post and reblog them. “Canceling” is therefore a competition of headcount, with tactics for sidekick—the side with more people, and people who are good at disseminating information, decides the outcome: whether the intended-to-be-cancelled material go viral within the fandom, or whether they die out.

I’d like to highlight this word: headcount.

This isn’t the most favourable kind of competition to participate in, therefore, if the potential opposition belongs to the populous country in the world, its members, people who may have participated in fan circles, which are essentially fan armies who’ve been used to organising, battling on social media for their idols. I’ve previously set up a hypothetical scenario, in which Dd’s supertopic members were encouraged by their government to scale the Great Firewall to Twitter, spread their support of Xinjiang cotton—a scenario that is not totally unrealistic, given that the Chinese government has previously mobilised fans for propaganda purpose. 

We’ll use this thought experiment again ~ please bear in mind, once more, that this is SJD; a figment of our imagination.

Since we’re talking about Li-Ning brand, let’s add Gg’s supertopic members to the mix. The total supertopics member count is 6.11 + 8.34 = 14.45 million, as of today (2021/04/04). 

Let’s say, only a tiny, tiny percent—0.01% of them are mobilised; that’s 1,400 people.

Is it possible to cancel the voices, the retweets of 1,400 in Gg and Dd’s i-fandom? Cut down another 90%, reduce the opposition headcount to 140. Is it possible?

There are also overseas Chinese who do not intend to spread propaganda, but believe in the story and have no qualms disseminating the information. There are also fans who wish to remove politics from fandom and pass all information along.

Here lies the frustration of those who’ve tried to raise their voice of concerns re: the policies and practices of the Chinese government on social media; and this is why I mentioned that my background informed my opinion. On social media, where headcount and whoever shouts the loudest, retweet etc the most wins the exposure game, it’s nearly impossible to win against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s propaganda machine, if the party chooses to have the machine running. 

Their side has so many people.

One more RL example: here’s a scholarly article detailing how Diba (帝吧), an old, popular online forum in China with 20 million members, mobilised, collectively scaled the Firewall and engaged in a cyberattack of the Facebook page of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen on January 20, 2016 — the day of President Tsai Ing-wen’s first inauguration; they left a total of 26,000 comments against Taiwan independence, using Simplified Chinese (which China uses) for their font instead of Traditional Chinese (which Taiwan and Hong Kong uses)—ie, the commenters didn’t even pretend to be not from China. They were proud and open about their "Expedition”.

(China’s state-controlled tabloid Global Times—yes, the same one involved in the Hong Kong airport incident above—”concluded the campaign was a “fun normal incident” that showcased young people’s passion for politics”)

Is it possible to try to cancel something of that scale? Is it realistic?

Personally, therefore, I’ve always advocated for “immunisation”: rather than protecting a fact by wiping out its associated lies—the idea behind “cancelling” a message, not having it show up on the dash—I prefer to do so by allowing it to be visibly challenged, until observers are no longer easily swayed by falsehoods. I used Gg and Dd’s Weibo reblog re: Hong Kong police as an example—is the red little box propaganda, a challenge to the protests? Yes. Is it information that I deeply disagree with, something I wish I’ll never see again? Also yes. But by providing context to it, I’m hoping to turn it into a vaccine—something mimicking the virus, the potentially viral piece of information, but doesn’t function the same way anymore. 

Hopefully, this vaccine will also encourage stop-and-think moments that boost future immunity; hopefully, with a few more boosters, questions will come automatically with such red little boxes reappear— questions about the context, the purpose, the message. 

Questions like these, for this incident: why did the State media make this incident the “Gotcha” moment in the Hong Kong Protests, important enough for People’s Daily to make a rally-starting meme? Why was the reporter, Fu Guohao hailed as a hero, when he’d just got ... beaten up? 

What did People’s Daily, and the government behind it, want people to find when the red little box popped up everywhere on Weibo, including the Weibo of the fastest rising stars from the hit summer TV series? What belief could be expected to be instilled into the audience with this photo, published by China’s state TV station (CGTN), of the reporter tied up to a luggage cart and surrounded by black-cladded protestors?

Who looked like the strong, evil side? The meek, good side? Why, finally, was the tag about the Hong Kong Police, when the conflict was between the protestors and an alleged Chinese state media reporter?

By then, Hong Kongers were already suspicious that the Hong Kong Police had been infiltrated by China’s law enforcement arm, from hints from the different dialects the police used, how they handled the protestors etc. It was the start the final break down of Hong Kong’s autonomy. Their suspicions were not wrong. Now, with the National Security Law having taken effect since July 2020, Hong Kong’s transformation into a police state is well under way.

What does the tag #I support Hong Kong Police too# mean now?

[Please excuse my using many examples from HK because 1) I’m familiar with the details; and 2) it’s the only instance in recent history in which the outside world can see, with relative clarity, a large-scale protest against the Chinese government and its outcome.]

Here’s my humble wish: next time, when a government-sponsored memes like this get translated and posted, be it originally reblogged by Gg, Dd, or other c-ent stars, be it on Twitter or Tumblr, the vaccinated, immunised will pause and wonder: What’s the story? What’s being told inside the Great Firewall, and outside? 

If this happens, red little boxes on my blog, unpleasant as they are, are 100% worth it.

The Li-Ning ads are therefore worth it too, IMO, if they spark a conversation, a dissemination of facts and perspectives. To me, the latter is especially precious in this fandom, where significant language and cultural barriers exist.  Fans who move Gg and Dd’s news and candies from Weibo are the pillars of this fandom. Sieving through that website is hard, translations harder; it’s unfair and unrealistic to ask them to also be the background knowledge deliverers. 

I’ve tried to do a small part, but I’m ... slow. Very, very slow. However, even if the background isn’t available, I’ve found being careful, skeptical about the information is already a very good thing. At heart, this is no different from the lessons from media literacy here, except there are even more falsehoods and half-truths to wade through given the country of origin of Gg and Dd’s material, and trustworthy sources are not always available. Li-Ning brand is an example that things do not need to be blatant propaganda to carry a pro-CCP message. 

What can i-fans do then about the Xinjiang cotton situation, if competing against the Chinese government propaganda machine on social media appears to be a losing game?

My thoughts are these, at the moment. First, please consider not dwelling on the competition, especially within fandom. Remember: getting several fewer fans to buy Li-Ning brand isn’t going to change the big picture.

Instead, if this is an area of activism you choose to participate in—please consider channeling your effort to watching the companies in your country. Put pressure on sustainability & good practice certification companies like Better Cotton Initiative, make sure they don’t, can’t have it both ways. Xinjiang cotton is either certified or it isn’t. There’re suspicions of forced labor on its production or there aren’t. The answer should be a simple yes or no, not whether the office is in Geneva or in Shanghai.

This is an answer that we, as consumers, have the right to know. Transparency in China isn’t for us to demand; we can, however, demand transparency in our own country. Remember too: it makes a far, far greater difference for one international company to re-consider its cotton source, than for one fandom to do the same. 

Meanwhile, and again, this is my humble opinion—please do whatever you’re comfortable with, that is within your ability, to fortify your stance. Should you choose to speak out online, you’ll likely meet opposition. Responses on current events from the Chinese Foreign Ministry (you can also find the spokespeople on Twitter) can offer a glimpse of the counterarguments you may meet. How will you answer them? Here’s a clip of one of the spokespeople arguing that the US used to use black slavery to pick cotton in the past. If you’re American and this is presented to you—what would you say? (Does mistakes by one country in the past mean mistakes by another country in the present is automatically acceptable?) The opposition may also use vicious words, the most extreme of which is probably “racist”. If someone call you racist—if many Twitter users scream racist!!!!!!!! at you at the same time for your critique—can you stand firm? 

[The pro-CCP camp has been taking advantage of the West’s effort to move forward from its racist past to stop any criticism of the Chinese government. It already knows the easiest way to silence the criticisms is to call whoever makes them racist.]

[If everyone fears the racist allegation, allows the conflation of Chinese government and Chinese people to take root, will there be more or less anti-Asian sentiments in the long run?]

[I’ve been called racist by writing these metas.] 

The last thing I’d like to say is this: please be kind to your fellow fans who’ve kept mum, or been hesitant about making their stance known. Some may be closely connected to China, others may not be in a psychological / health space to deal with the politics. Also, and here’s my default way of looking at this: I disagree with the idea that anyone owes anyone else a declaration of their political beliefs. I can’t imagine this issue to be an easy thing to think about for many Gg and Dd fans, myself most definitely included ~ as a (former) Hong Konger, a uniformed Gg or Dd gives me an unpleasant visceral response, but at the same time, it also means I’m used to accepting, even genuinely liking people on the other side of this political ... Grand Canyon. I can imagine the conflict, the pain this issue may have caused some fans who’re not accustomed to the latter, as being a fan, IMO, is never purely logical ~ and I mean that in the best of ways. 

Passion is the magic ingredient that separates a fan and a consumer. It’s also what makes choices difficult, when conclusions from logic, political stance included, conflict with it. Some make the hard choices quickly; some, slowly. Some make them in one go; some, piece by piece. Some never make them, let time be the decision maker.

As Dd said so famously and wisely, about the conflict between passion and logic: 愛就是這樣，沒有辦法 Love is like that. Nothing can be done.

The only common denominator is this: we’re all made to love.

❤️.💛.💚.

[ghostofnibelheim]

Doctor’s Orders [RP Rules]

Please read before interacting~

This blog will explore adult themes such as violence, gore, strong language and sex. I’ll do my best to have these posts tagged appropriately. If this makes you feel uncomfortable in any which way I advise that you do not follow;

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Give this post a like so that I know you’ve read it, thank you.

[scripttorture]

I have a weird scenario and i want to ask about its implications, mostly focusing on soliditary confinement aspects. So I am writing about this all powerful being who is immortal+eternally youthful (with a human like mind) who gets trapped in basically a big snowglobe created by his powers. Its a big mostly open space set inside a forest with a magic mansion to occupy him and provide him basic needs and the limits of the globe are very defined. {1/4}

{Weird anon} After some time alone he comes to create a friend to accompany him and make sure everything goes well during his absence using his powers. This friend can and does leave for periods of time to fullfill his duties but comes back. The being also realises during his imprisonment his powers dwindle with time and the globe starts to get smaller as he starts to age, meaning he will either die from old age or the globe shrinking. {2/4} {WA}After what he thinks must be a long time, his graying hair biggest indication, kids who knew about his legend come to discover him. They then bring him their older sibling, then their parents to talk and after some plot he gets to get some of his powers back and be free. (Posting my questions in the last part) {3/4} {WA} I was wondering if the confinement area being comfy and big, him having this friend would help during confinement? How could he react to aging/idea of dying? Although this isnt very possible in RL, could the fact he had to create this friend ,but mostly the fact he would have no one else if he didnt, get to him? How could he interract with kids/people who found him, i know people tend to have difficulty with interractions after time. Ty for your help! {4/4} {WA EXTRA} Forgot to mention these but 3 kids are 10 to 12, older sibling is 14-15, parents are mid thirties . Again, thank you for your time.

-

That’s an interesting fantasy scenario (and not even close to the weirdest thing I’ve been asked) thank you for sharing it :)

 I think the first thing to grasp is that this character isn’t constantly in solitary confinement here and that’s a smart writing choice. You’ve got the character creating at least one companion and even though that companion isn’t always present that means it’s likely they’re both getting at least 1-2 hours of contact most of the time.

 That doesn’t mean this isn’t a stressful situation and it doesn’t mean there are no periods of solitary confinement.

 But it gives you leeway to make the effects of this fairly realistic even with the fantasy concept.

 Having a big, comfortable space doesn’t really make a difference to how well people deal with isolation. Socialising is a physical need for social species like humans. But the presence of a companion makes the world of difference.

 I think the first thing to decide is exactly how long it takes him to make his companion. A lot of people really overestimate the time we can withstand isolation.

 For reference the safe period is about a week. After that most people will start to show symptoms and the symptoms are a lot more likely to persist after release. A month is more then enough time for the character to be seriously effected. A year is a really extreme amount of time. And by the time you start getting to multiple years the chances of suicide attempts are… significant.

 With the kind of story you’re describing I get the impression you want long term effects but don’t want symptoms etc to take over the story. I think 1-3 months is a perfect time frame for that. The character would develop long term symptoms but it’s still in the realm where it’s survivable. Which means it’s less likely to take over the whole narrative.

 You’ve probably seen my masterpost on solitary confinement but here it is again just in case :) I really recommend Shalev’s Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement which is linked as one of the sources on the post.

 As with the symptoms of torture more generally you’ve got some scope to choose symptoms because not everyone will experience every single symptom. There’s still some debate about how common individual symptoms are. However broadly depression and anxiety seem to be very common and hallucinations are less common (though they seem to become more likely the longer someone is confined). It’s a good idea to pick a mix of physical and psychological symptoms.

 If you choose insomnia as a symptom remember that sleep deprivation also causes problems which you can read about in the masterpost here.

 If this is your first time writing something like this then picking out symptoms can be daunting. I try to think of it in terms of what adds to the story. I try to consider the characters, plot and overall themes. Symptoms that give you opportunities to show aspects of the character’s personality, change their relationship with other characters, highlight themes in the story and/or create interesting problems in the plot later on are all good picks.

 It’s also important to consider what you’re comfortable writing and what you feel able to write. If you don’t want to write self harm for example that’s a perfectly good reason for ruling out that symptom.

 I have a post that outlines my process for picking symptoms that might be helpful for you. :)

 I think that brings us round to the more fantasy side of the questions.

 I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know how people generally deal with the idea that they’re going to die soon. I suspect that there’d be a lot of individual variation. I think you’ll get the best answers by looking up charities that support people with terminal illnesses.

 I found a couple of links at Marie Curie that might serve as a starting point. There’s this page on palliative care. This general page (with lots of links and first hand accounts) of living with a terminal illness. You might find this page about emotionally processing a terminal diagnosis helpful.

 I would treat the emotional issues around the created companion the same as a character who is reliant on only one person for their social needs. Which can put a lot of weird strains on a relationship.

 I’m not a psychologist and what I say here is based on impressions I gained from interviews with people who are very isolated. If you see a mental health professional or someone who studies isolation more seriously saying something different take their word over mine. Because my reading and knowledge is broad rather then deep.

 Relying on one person for all your social needs isn’t healthy. We all have different needs and it’s a lot easier for those needs to be met when we’re interacting with more then one person. Being entirely reliant on one person puts a lot of pressure on that person. It can make it seem like any problems or issues the more isolated person has are the other person’s fault.

 Because they’re not magically meeting all of someone’s needs. And I say ‘magically’ because it’s almost impossible for one person to do the ‘job’ of a dozen people.

 There can be a lot of guilt, resentment and anger floating around in this sort of dependant relationship. Even when both parties are genuinely trying their best and trying to be healthy.

 Any depressive period or severe mood swing on the part of the reliant character might be interpreted as failure by the companion. As if it’s their job to ‘fix’ the mental health problems he has. And that can lead to a lot of internalised guilt and shame.

 Conversely being aware of how dependant he is could make the confined character resent the comparative freedom of his companion. They get to leave. They’ll survive the end of this snow-globe. They’ve never had to be alone as he was.

 The companion has a lot of power in this scenario because the confined character is entirely reliant on them. They also have the power to leave. Knowing that can breed resentment, whether it’s rational or not. And if it’s irrational and ‘undeserved’ that can lead to a degree of self hatred and guilt.

 For both parties anger at each other and the situation seems likely. Not necessarily all the time but I think it’s likely to come up over and over again.

 The companion has their own desires and wants. But the confined character is entirely dependant on them and may well expect them to drop everything to help him/meet his socialisation needs. And the thing is that’s unfair on both of them, because the situation is unfair.

 That’s not a critique of the story. It’s unfair for the confined character to expect the companion to be able to meet all his needs and to drop everything to help him. But it’s also not unreasonable for the confined character to grasp at his only option for fulfilling a fundamental need.

 I think that if you wanted to treat this ‘realistically’ then it would lead to a pretty unhealthy co-dependant relationship however much both characters tried to avoid that.

 But you do have the ability to reduce or avoid that in your story. Because you choose the rules for how this companion feels, acts and behaves.

 The confined character may be human-like but in a lot of ways the companion does not have to be. A realistic human-like person would not be able to support all the social needs of another person. But there’s no reason the companion has to be that human.

 If you do choose to deviate from a more human-like character I think my advice would be to think through any changes you make logically. And be consistent. If for instance the character can’t feel angry or resentful towards their creator think through what that might mean.

 Which leaves the final question about interacting with others and how difficult that can be after periods of isolation.

 The exact way this effects interactions depends chiefly on the symptoms you pick out and the character’s personality.

 Generally mentally ill people do not want to be assholes or upset other people. But we do tend to have greater difficulties interacting with people and our social interactions can go badly in ways that healthy people don’t tend to experience.

 For instance say we have a character who has a severe anxiety disorder and this disorder is often set off by noises they don’t expect. That’s a fairly common symptom and a fairly common trigger for it.

 That means that kids running around, shouting or just talking loudly about something that excites them, could set off an anxiety attack.

 Some people would get angry in that situation. Because they’re in pain and, even though they did not mean to, those kids ‘caused’ that pain.

 Some people would abruptly remove themselves from the situation. Which could leave the kids wondering why/how they upset their new friend so much.

 Some people would stick around and not blame the kids. But they might have visible signs of their anxiety attack that could be very frightening for a child who doesn’t understand what’s going on. If an adult they care about suddenly starts shaking and breathing hard and needs to sit down and looks pale- Well worry is natural. And it’s difficult to explain triggers/mental health problems while you’re in the middle of an anxiety attack.

 So there’s a set of issues that are symptom driven and around the extra difficulties interacting while mentally ill. There’s also a set of issues around… basically forgetting how to socialise.

 This doesn’t necessarily mean being age in-appropriate.

 I think the best way to think about it is a combination of finding it harder to interpret other people’s emotional cues and being less aware of the cues they’re sending out themselves. It might take longer for the character to realise they’ve upset someone or they might misidentify the other person’s emotional response.

 They might also think less before they speak. Which can mean things like- I guess not moderating what they say to account for other people’s feelings? They might come across as blunt or thoughtless or scatter brained as they jump from one topic to another. They might also have less of a grasp of when to give the other person space and let them speak.

 The biggest thing I see survivors of solitary report is that normal social interaction makes them much more anxious/nervous then it did before they were confined. Socialising has a bigger ‘cost’ then before, in terms of energy and emotional impact.

 And this often means they withdraw from it more quickly. They need to take breaks. Or they start getting more stressed and frustrated.

 I think the main thing to navigate here would be how to explain these conditions and needs to children in a way that doesn’t seem like it’s blaming the kids. Which is certainly possible, but can take some time and care to get right.

 I think I’ll leave it there and if you’ve got any further questions drop them in when the ask box reopens. I hope that helps :)

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[biostudyblog]

Classical Genetics

Gregor Mendel is the founder of genetics as we know it. In the 1850s, he bred garden peas in order to study patterns of heredity. He collected data from hundreds of plants across generations and used statistical analysis to predict these patterns.

In his experiments, he studied the law of dominance, the law of segregation, and the law of independent assortment.

Law of Dominance

When two homozygous (purebred) organisms for opposing traits are crossed, the offspring will be hybrid (they will carry two different alleles) but their phenotype will be that of the dominant trait.

Law of Segregation

The law of segregation says that during the formation of alleles, the two traits carried by each parent separate. Thus two hybrid parents, although they may have the phenotype for the dominant allele, can have a baby with the recessive phenotype (phenotype is what the organism looks like, while genotype are the actual alleles of the organism)

Monohybrid Cross

A monohybrid cross is an act of crossing two organisms that are hybrid for a single trait, such as Tt x Tt (T= tall t=short). The result of a monohybrid cross is 1:2:1 where there is a 25% chance the organism will be homozygous dominant, 50% chance the organism will be heterozygous dominant and a 25% chance the organism will be homozygous recessive.

Backcross or Testcross

If you don’t know whether an individual plant or animal is homozygous or heterozygous, it is effective to cross them with a homozygous recessive individual. If all the offspring display the dominant trait, the mystery parent is most likely homozygous dominant. If the offspring have a mix of dominant and recessive traits, the mystery parent is heterozygous dominant.

Law of Independent Assortment

When a cross is carried out between two individuals who are hybrid for two traits on separate chromosomes, during gamete formation, the genes for one trait (for example, height) are not inherited along with the genes for another trait (such as seed colour)

T= tall t=short Y=yellow y=green

The diagram above is of a dihybrid individual. T will be inherited along with Y, and t will be inherited along with y. The only factor that determines how the alleles are inherited is how the homologous pairs line up during metaphase I.

Here is a Punnett square for this dihybrid cross.

The phenotype ratio ends up being 9:3:3:1, as shown above. 

Incomplete Dominance

Incomplete dominance leads to the blending of treats. For example, if a long watermelon (LL) crosses with a round watermelon (RR) to produce an oval watermelon (RL), incomplete dominance is at play.

Another example is the Japanese four o’clock flower. Below, 1 red flower and 1 white flower combine to make 4 pink flowers.

Codominance

In codominance, both traits show. For example, the MN blood group in humans is a codominant trait (don’t confuse these with blood types). These are based on distinct molecules on the surface of the cell. A person can be homozygous for M, homozygous for N, or heterozygous for MN, where both molecules appear on the blood cell.

Multiple Alleles

Most genes exist in two allelic forms, etc tall or short. When there are more than two alleles, the gene has multiple alleles. Human blood type is a good example, as there are 4 groups, determined by 3 alleles. Blood type can either be written as its letters A, B, O, and AB, or I^a, I^b, I^a I^b, and ii. “I” stands for immunoglobin.

Polygenic Inheritance

Some traits, like skin and hair colour result from the blending of several separate genes that vary along a continuum. They are controlled by multiple genes, and so are polygenic. This leads to a wide variation in genotype.

(y-axis is labelled: the proportion of the population)

Sex-Linked Genes

When a trait is carried on the X chromosome, it is sex-linked. Since women have 2 X chromosomes, if the trait is a recessive mutation, she will need to carry two mutated genes for it to express itself. If she only has one, she will be a carrier.  Meanwhile, since men only have 1 chromosome (XY) they only need 1 gene for it to express itself. Recessive sex-linked traits are much more common that dominant sex-linked traits. This explains why men are much more likely to have sex-linked traits like colourblindness and haemophilia.

Epigenetics

In some scenarios, the environment can alter gene expression. For example, in fruit flies, the expression of the vestigial wings (short, and shrivelled) can repaired in higher temperatures.

Sex-Influenced Inheritance

Sex-influenced traits are not the same as linked traits. For example, baldness is a trait expressed both in men and women, however, it expresses itself very differently in the two sexes.

Karyotypes

Karyotypes are lab procedures, where the size, shape, and number of chromosomes are analyzed. This takes place during metaphase, as this is when the chromosomes are fully condensed. In our 46 chromosomes, we have 44 autosomes (22 pairs) and 2 sex chromosomes.

This karyotype is of an average biological male.

The Pedigree

A pedigree is a family tree that studies the inheritance of a specific trait. Normally, in these graphs, a woman is represented by a circle, and a man by a square. In the pedigree below, black shapes represent deaf people.

On this pedigree, deafness is shown to be autosomally recessive. We know it is not dominant, as when a deaf parent has children as shown in this pedigree, none of their children has the phenotype, and all the affected children have unaffected parents. We also know it isn’t sex-linked, as looking at the two daughters in the F3 generation, neither of their fathers is affected.

Mutations

Mutations are abnormalities within the genome. They can occur in the somatic (body) cells and can cause cancer, or they can occur during gametogenesis, and affect future offspring. (When the somatic cells are impacted, future generations are not.)

Gene mutations- Gene mutations are changes in a DNA sequence.

Chromosome mutations- Chromosome mutations are able to be observed under a light microscope. An example of a chromosome mutation is nondisjunction. Nondisjunction may add an entirely new chromosome. Some other types of chromosomal aberrations include:

Deletion- When a fragment lacking a centromere is lost during cell division

Inversion- When a chromosomal fragment reattaches to its original chromosome, but in the reverse orientation

Translocation- When a fragment of a chromosome becomes attached to a non-homologous chromosome

Nondisjunction

Nondisjunction is an error during meiosis, where homologous chromosomes do not separate properly. When this happens, one gamete has two homologues, while the other doesn’t have any.

An abnormal chromosomal condition is known as aneuploidy. If a chromosome is present in triplicate, the condition is called trisomy. For example, people with down syndrome have 3 #21 chromosomes, and so have trisomy-21. Any organism with an extra set of chromosomes is called a triploid. The cells of the endosperm or cotyledon of seed are triploid. When an organism has more than 3 sets of chromosomes, they are a polyploid. Polyploid plants have abnormally large flowers and fruits.

[possiblyimbiassed]

What happened to Sherlock? Part V – Bizarre Scenarios

I think it’s time for another monster post in my meta series. :) I might have said that I’d try to make it shorter this time, but somehow I got carried away... ;). Which is not that surprising, actually, since today’s topic is something I could go on and on about; there’s an infinity of stuff to explore in the show from this perspective. Anyway, you can find the earlier parts of my series below:

Introduction - The game is on (explains the method of analysis) Part I - Blog vs TV-show Part II - Re-living memories Part III - Drugs and weirdness Part IV – Heartbreak and coma (1) Part IV – Heartbreak and coma (2)

So, this fifth installment (out of nine in total) will explore the idea of Sherlock’s brain running a kind of simulations - basically a series of hypothetic ‘what if’ scenarios - at least from HLV and forwards. And it builds upon the conclusions from these earlier metas, namely that this show is seen entirely from Sherlock’s perspective; that we’re inside the great detective’s mind from Day 1. 

But since I believe Sherlock is in coma from HLV and onwards (see Part IV), he can’t quite distinguish these scenarios from ‘reality’. So, here goes the next hypothesis:

Hypothesis #5: Almost everything we see happen in HLV, TAB and S4 is Sherlock ‘running scenarios’ in his mind, based on a mix of his earlier memories and movies he has watched.

To test this, I think I might first need to explain some things about the concept of ‘running scenarios’, as far as I know from real life. 

Predictive modeling

At work, I’m involved in a kind of data modeling that makes me think of Sherlock’s brain. The general principle is this: You collect a set of data of a certain type (in my case it’s geographic data), you run your data set through a computer algorithm, in which some limiting values are defined, and as result you get a predicted outcome of the phenomenon you’re studying. In my case the result is a digital map that shows the most probable geographical distribution of the phenomenon. The resulting map scenario is based upon someone’s expert knowledge of the subject matter, which is integrated into the computer algorithm and used by the model. In short: you use your data sets to run the model to make predictions - scenarios.

But how can you know that your predictions are accurate? Well, you can never expect them to be entirely accurate, since the modeling is always a theoretical simplification of reality. But you can always try to validate the predictions by comparing them to real-world observations of the phenomenon in question. If a great majority of the real-world observations fall within your plotted map, then you can regard the prediction as useful; otherwise you must collect new data, re-adjust the model and try again.

Now, let’s compare this predictive modeling method to John’s and Sherlock’s conversation in TLD (all quotes from the show in this meta come from Ariane deVere’s invaluable transcripts. Bolding is always mine, though):

JOHN: Wednesday morning I booked today’s session. Now, today is Friday. So two weeks ago – two weeks before you were abducted at gunpoint and brought here against your will, over a week before I even thought of coming here - you knew exactly where you’d need to be picked up for lunch?

SHERLOCK: Really? I correctly anticipated the responses of people I know well to scenarios I devised. Can’t everyone do that?

Well, no Sherlock; we really can’t, and neither can you in this case - at least not in ‘real life’! I think John’s disbelief is totally justified; there are so many ‘feasible variables’ involved in this operation – people and things and events that uncontrollably vary in time and space – and so many assumptions based upon each other, that it would be absolutely impossible for Sherlock to predict the future with this kind of accuracy. He might get a general idea of where and when he could probably find John, yes; perhaps he could even narrow it down to a matter of days and miles, if he had enough circumstantial data. 

But he could never know the exact time and place of John’s appointment with another person two weeks in advance - when even John himself hadn’t decided it yet - merely by deductive reasoning. Neither could he possibly know that in this very instant it would occur to Mrs Hudson to abduct him and directly after it would occur to John to have Molly Hooper examine Sherlock, instead of simply doing it himself. Even a weather forecast is extremely insecure in details two weeks in advance (x, x), and the meteorologists have powerful computer programs and mathematical models at their disposal, while Sherlock in this case would have only his own brain.

But I believe here is where Sherlock leaves us one of the most important clues in the whole show about his methods and about what’s actually going on in S4; he talks about himself having ‘devised scenarios’. So maybe this is what he has been doing all along, since the last time he entered his Mind Palace!

But what kind of scenarios is he referring to? And why does he even want to set up these scenarios? I mean, if he were using predictions and scenarios, it would seem that he’s working on solving some kind of problem, right? Or at least that he’s studying some interesting phenomenon. But the only ‘problem’ we’re told about in TLD is that he wants John’s help to catch a serial killer. So why not just send a message to John and ask for his assistance with the case? Why ‘devise’ an elaborate dramatic scenario involving Mrs Hudson, Molly and John’s new therapist; none of which has anything to do with the crime case? The answer might be that Sherlock is actually working on quite another case than ‘Culverton Smith the Serial Killer’: his own personal case, trying to find out what went wrong between him and John in order to save John Watson.

In any case, Sherlock cannot make this TLD prediction with 100% accuracy; it doesn’t matter how well he knows people, that just isn’t possible. At least not in the ‘real’ world where there are too many things that can go wrong just by chance. Sherlock may like to think that he has every little detail under control, but he’s only human after all, like everybody else. Which means that these scenarios are most probably taking place inside Sherlock’s head. And his predicted outcome about John in TLD is a fine example of this. Inside his brain, Sherlock can control most of the parameters and not much is left to chance, so the model works there, broadly speaking. But IRL it wouldn’t.

Assumption upon assumption

Now, an important aspect of predictive modeling is that you need to make certain assumptions to run your scenarios; a sort of simplification of reality. But the problem is that the more assumptions you pile up, one upon the other, without reality checks in between, the more uncertain your results will be. An assumption based on another assumption will always be more insecure than the first one, right? Sherlock’s problem here might be precisely the lack of contact with reality; he needs to validate his scenarios with observations from real life. Otherwise the modeling will be more and more biased and the results more and more twisted. But I believe it’s shown clearly in S4 that there is no new input of RL data, since everything seems to have already happened before in one form or another. And the consequence of this is that Sherlock’s scenarios keep getting more and more unbelievable, derailing into their almost complete logical collapse in TFP, where so many absurd and impossible things happen that the plot loses all kinds of credibility. In short, I think TFP is the final result of Sherlock’s permanent bias.

Heteronormative bias

Let’s say that one of Sherlock’s assumptions is biased in some direction, that it’s somehow influenced by his own emotions (Sentiment; the fly in the ointment, the crack in the lens, etc, etc). With the chain of scenarios described above, the error will multiply with each new similar assumption, and the results of his mental experiments will end up not making much sense at all, just like TFP. One of the most significant biases/errors I believe Sherlock commits, is that he totally excludes ‘Johnlock’ from the equation; he doesn’t take into account even the possibility of John being in love with him or the possibility of the two of them ever becoming a couple. He consequently interprets any sign of affection from John as either directed at someone else (a woman of course) -

- or as a misguided hero-worship of an unworthy character -

- probably linked to John’s adrenaline dependence -

- which John surely will sooner or later grow out of.

This may have to do with Sherlock’s lack of self-esteem and/or fear of emotions, but it’s a heteronormative bias and it’s severe, since it stops him from seeing the problem clearly, which might make him miss the solution entirely. And as long as heteronormativity and homophobia aren’t on Sherlock’s conscious checklist of possible problems to deal with, I’m afraid he won’t discover this bias. And since Sherlock makes this assumption again and again, without ever testing its opposite and without reality checks, he ends up with narrow-minded, absurd and dystopic results from his modeling, which ultimately don’t bring happiness to anyone. Sherlock has an amazing brain capacity, but I think he gets ‘lost in the sky’, high above everyone else, as the little girl on the plane (Eurus) explains in TFP. I’ll try to explore this idea with my own little prediction testing below.

Prediction #1: When Sherlock is in coma there will be no more entirely new events that seem realistic

If Sherlock is unconscious, his brain might still keep on working on his eternal scenarios based on memories, even though it has no new input data from the external world to process. The events would now all be based on things Sherlock has heard or experienced or imagined before he entered his comatose state. Which means they will all feel a bit familiar, unless they are pure fanciful fabrications - often absurd or surrealistic - which is basically what happens in a dream state (and perhaps more so if it’s drug-induced).

And yes, I think we can see this expected pattern quite clearly, with a remarkable difference between the events up until TSoT on one hand, and in HLV and onwards on the other.

In TSoT some rather ‘ordinary’ things happen that are not uncommon events IRL, but we haven’t actually seen most of them in the show before: there’s a bank robbery, a wedding reception, a bride, a church, a (real) priest, a photographer. There’s also Sherlock writing a speech, folding serviettes and planning a party, there’s a ‘stag do’ and Sherlock gets drunk and vomits. Sherlock deduces that John’s newly wed wife is pregnant.

And we could also apply this test to all the episodes before TSoT, looking for ‘novel’, non-repetitive and still believable events (I don’t count ASiP, though, since it’s the very first episode thus cannot be repetitive):

TBB: Coherent crime case; smugglers use secret codes, run a circus and one of the acrobats can climb high buildings. John (innocently) gets an ASBO for graffiti.

TGG: A series of crime cases with hostages threatened to be blown up, including John. Poison murders and strangling.

ASiB: Weird crime case with a manipulative dominatrix. Mrs Hudson is attacked. Sherlock still solves it in a believable way. He is rude to his guests at a Christmas party.

THoB: A fairly believable crime story involving a shift of environment to Dartmoor, a client who is being ‘gas-lighted’ by the criminal of the case, and a military laboratory.

TRF: Child kidnapping case, a boarding school. A trial. Extensive media coverage of (Sherlock as) a celebrity, who becomes a murder suspect but fakes his own suicide. 

TEH: Sherlock returns from the ‘dead’ and carries on crime solving but has problems with John. John is now engaged, which is also new.

In HLV, on the other hand, most of the believable things are repetitive; John beats someone up (ASiB, TRF, TEH), someone gets shot (ASiP, TBB, ASiB, THoB), Sherlock and John visit a high and/or fancy building (TBB, ASiB, THoB, TEH), they celebrate Christmas (ASiB), Mrs Hudson’s past is discussed (ASiP, TSoT), 221B is searched for drugs (ASiP, ASiB), John seems jealous of a woman whom he thinks Sherlock is attracted to (ASiB), Sherlock and Mycroft smoke cigarettes together (ASiB), we see their parents (TEH), there’s a memory stick thrown away without anyone checking it out (TGG) and there are helicopters about (ASiB, TEH, TSoT).

The only completely new scenes in HLV either seem unbelievable or have to do with Sherlock openly using drugs; suddenly he is high in a drug den, his blood is analysed for drugs, he gets an IV drug drip and he drugs his whole family at Christmas. Among the unbelievable stuff: Sherlock is shot in the chest by John’s wife but miraculously survives. John’s wife turns out to be a ninja assassin (which is also repetitive, only with a new twist; assassins appeared in TBB, TGG and TRF and in TBB they climbed high buildings). Sherlock blows someone’s head off and becomes a murderer.  And don’t get me started again about the absurdity of John forgiving someone who tried to kill Sherlock. But none of the most unbelievable and horrifying of these events are canon consistent; ACD’s Mary Morstan never shoots anyone, Holmes is never shot, Holmes never kills anyone and Watson never ‘forgives’ anyone who has attacked Holmes. Sherlock’s drug use is canon, though, so I don’t think it’s too farfetched to believe that much of this is simply crack fantasies.

The repetitive scenes then continue in TAB and throughout the whole of S4, while the lack of realism escalates all the way up to TFP. I made a whole list of repeated scenes here  (and there are even more in the additions to that meta).

Prediction #2: If Sherlock is running scenarios, there will be indications that this is his typical method of solving puzzles

The word ‘scenario’ is very similar to the word ‘scene’, isn’t it? And we know both from canon and the show that Sherlock Holmes likes a touch of Drama and loves to disguise himself in the most peculiar ways. In one of the parts of TAB that we know for sure is taking place within Sherlock’s Mind Palace, a very obvious stage is shown as part of his method of figuring out what happened with the Abominable Bride:

I certainly don’t intend to take any credits for the scenario idea since other people presented it already long ago. Like, for example, @loudest-subtext-in-tv (LSiT), who pointed it out directly after S4 aired.  Or @raggedyblue, whose meta about The Mind Theatre, where it’s all beautifully laid-out, is brilliant in its straightforward reasoning. And, of course, the whole EMP theory developed by @gosherlocked, @the-7-percent-solution and @monikakrasnorada,  is a great foundation for the idea that what we see in S4 are indeed concoctions made up inside Sherlock’s mind. Already in 2016, before S4, @gosherlocked pointed out a series of inconsistencies as evidence that HLV is at least partly taking place inside Sherlock’s EMP. In their comment to this post, I think @tetragon4 said something interesting about how to interpret HLV and TAB as being EMP:

“Now, this is not about what I, or for that matter, what the fandom prefers. The question is: Do HLV and TAB support the theory? This is a difficult one to answer. Sure, there are inconsistencies like the camera/lighting, Mycroft’s cravat, or Mary’s pose. One swallow, though, does not make a summer. As such, what EMP theory needs is an in-depth analysis of the two episodes. Until then, it is too early to speculate based on unrelated inconsistencies. It is necessary to prove the existence of common inconsistencies running through the scenes after the supposed entrance into EMP”.

And I agree; it doesn’t really matter how we, the audience, feel about the idea of much of this show happening inside Sherlock’s head – the important thing is where the evidence takes us. So, @tetragon4’s suggestion is partly similar to what I’ll try to do with the next prediction: search HLV, piece by piece, for inconsistencies telling us that what we see might actually be Sherlock’s brain running a series of simulations or theoretical ‘what if’ scenarios.

As @raggedyblue demonstrates in their meta linked above, it’s repeatedly shown in ACD Canon that Holmes’ method of investigation is based on imagination. When Holmes explains his methods to Watson, he often mentions the importance of putting himself in the other person’s place to explore how they must have reasoned. For example in this quote from The Sign of Four:   “I then put myself in the place of Small and looked at it as a man of his capacity would. He would probably consider that to send back the launch or to keep it at a wharf would make pursuit easy if the police did happen to get on his track. How, then, could he conceal the launch and yet have her at hand when wanted? I wondered what I should do myself if I were in his shoes. I could only think of one way of doing it”. In TSoT Sherlock very clearly puts himself in James Sholto’s place, to try to convince him to not commit suicide:

Holmes also frequently uses himself as an actor while solving crime cases, usually to fool the suspects. For example, Watson tells us in A Scandal in Bohemia (SCAN), at a point in the story where Holmes disguised himself as a clergyman before appearing at Irene Adler’s home (which is also exactly what he does in ASiB):  “It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime”.

So yes; as demonstrated above, I think we can safely say that putting up scenarios in his head, as well as using ‘actors’ – including himself - are definitely important methods in Sherlock Holmes’ puzzle-solving.

Prediction #3: If Hypothesis #5 is true, we might find an initial ‘question’, some ‘inspiration’ and a ‘result’ for each scenario Sherlock is running.

As I’ve said before, I imagine that Sherlock’s extraordinary brain keeps working even when his body is unconscious, fighting for survival and trying to solve problems. I think he’s running a series of “what if” simulations, and they’re all about John Watson. I also think there are enough repetitive moments and enough movie references in this show to give ample material to Sherlock’s Mind Theatre, where he can stage very elaborate, dramatic scenarios, complete with actors, detailed premises and props.

To test Prediction #3 I’ll try to run through most of the scenes from HLV, in order to check if the statement above might be valid. For each of the scenarios, I’ll try to detect possible initial questions, which Sherlock might want to explore with the simulation in his Mind Theatre. I’ll also suggest possible elements from movies and/or Sherlock’s own memories that might have inspired the scenarios. Finally I’ll try to explain which results I think we can see in the show from each of Sherlock’s mind experiments. But I’ll also take the opportunity to discuss evidence that indicate it’s indeed just a mental scenario or - in some cases - speculate on possible alternative explanations.

HLV, Scenario 1: What will happen when John gets bored of his ordinary life with ‘Mary’? Inspiration: I think Sherlock’s memory of John beating him up after his return from the dead in TEH, his memory of John punching him in the face by Sherlock’s own request and provocation in ASiB, and John hitting the Chief Inspector when the Police arrested Sherlock in TRF; all this is making him think of John as potentially violent. Also, Sherlock deduced already in ASiP that John is attracted to danger.

[running, running the simulation, staged with ‘actors’ that either represent John or Sherlock or the challenges they are up to…]

Result: After some time of ordinary, married life, John can’t stand it anymore; he does something dangerous (because he’s an adrenaline junkie) and ends up hurting someone else doing it: he violently disarms Billy Wiggins and sprains his arm. Then he leaves Billy lying with his sprained arm and goes on to look for his neighbour’s drug addict son.

Discussion: But would John Watson really break into a drug den and single-handedly beat up the junkie who was guarding it, basically because he was bored? And how likely is it that he would then tell him “I’m a doctor, I know how to sprain people”? We’ve never seen John refer to his medical profession that horrible way, have we? (But we did hear him tell Sherlock in ASiB that he was a soldier and killed people). And would it be likely that the ‘gate-keeper’ (surrounded by hearts-and green tiles from 221B; is the eye there to make us pay attention?), who didn’t hesitate to draw knife on the intruder, would just lie there without even trying to run after him and at least warn the people in there? 

I suspect that a slightly exaggerated characterization of John starts here and later escalates, because drugs and Sentiment bias Sherlock’s mind. Sherlock’s capability of “correctly anticipating responses of people I know well” might begin to get altered already here.

HLV, Scenario 2: What will happen if John finds out that Sherlock has taken drugs? Inspiration: Already in ASiP John hears from the police that Sherlock is a drug user, and Sherlock doesn’t deny it. And in ASiB John conspires with Mycroft and Mrs Hudson to search 221B for any secret drug deposit of Sherlock’s. So both these events should be stored in Sherlock’s memory.

[Not so much running needed…]

Result: John gets furious with Sherlock and takes him to hospital; not for caretaking but simply for drug tests. He berates Sherlock for not having told him about his drug problems. Molly slaps him for ‘betraying his friends’ by throwing away his talent on drugs.

And John then joins forces with Mycroft and phones him immediately to have 221B searched for drugs. Discussion: This behaviour is not very ‘doctory’ or even humane of either John or Molly, though, is it? Sherlock is a close friend of theirs, whom both of them love, and he has just spent the night high in a drug den. But neither of them even tries to examine him, even though Molly obviously gets a positive result from the urine test. Instead, the whole scene is full of critique and punishment. And his brother Mycroft, who ‘constantly worries’ about Sherlock, now lets strangers into Sherlock’s flat to search it, and all he does is express contempt for Sherlock’s life style. I think this shows the influence of Sherlock’s self-loathing in the simulation – a pattern that will be repeated all the way through TAB and S4. Guilt. Sentiment. Drugs.

HLV, Scenario 3: What will happen if John finds out that Sherlock has a relationship with someone else (a woman, to boot)? Inspiration: Sherlock didn’t actually know Janine, but he might have noticed that John interrupted his dancing practice with her already at the wedding. And since she seemed a bit interested in Sherlock she would be the nearest candidate for this little test, where Sherlock could invent a good alibi for being with her: a crime case. But most of all, I think this experiment stems from Sherlock’s broken heart and jealous emotions; he subconsciously wants to get back at John for leaving him and marrying a woman.

[running, running the simulation…]

Result: John gets jealous and angry with Sherlock, but he tries to keep his face straight (pun intended); he won’t confess anything to Sherlock. 

Discussion: Here I believe Sherlock is indeed on to something, but he doesn’t see it clearly and consciously because of his bias. Bad characterization of Janine, also, who didn’t before seem stupid enough to wait in the bed of a supposed boyfriend who is away the whole night without telling why and doesn’t want to sleep with her anyway. Drugs. Sentiment. Underestimating women’s brain capacity (one of Sherlock’s biggest flaws I’d say; possibly originating in his contempt (=fear) of Sentiment).

Scenario 4: What will happen if Sherlock Holmes openly invites Media (CAM) to an interview? Inspiration: We already saw how the press treated Sherlock and John in TRF (for more analysis about this, see my meta about media’s role in BBC Sherlock and the additions to it) so Sherlock does have experience to fall back on here.

[running, running…]

Result: Media (CAM) own them now; they intimidate both Sherlock and John and try to find their pressure points.

They disarm John, ‘piss in Sherlock’s fireplace’ (violate his integrity), show contempt for their life-style and insinuate things about Sherlock’s traumatic past (Redbeard). And Sherlock can do basically nothing to defend himself.

Discussion: CAM’s supposed mental filing of information, and his use of a Mind Palace, seems suspiciously similar to Sherlock’s own methods of storing observations and deducing people based on it. (Look at the font, by the way; it’s written in Courier, just like a manuscript for a news article or a play or a film...). And I think Sherlock’s behaviour in this scene is weird, to say the least; why would he accept CAM’s armed thugs body searching him and John in his own house? Why would he let them intimidate Mrs Hudson (especially considering what he did to the CIA guy in ASiB)? And why would a brain like Sherlock’s immediately swallow CAM’s rather obvious bait with the letters? The depiction of John is a little strange too: how can he walk around, sit down, etc. seemingly without discomfort, when he has a big tyre lever stuck down his trousers? ;) Seeing this as a scenario in Sherlock’s head makes far more sense to me - probably influenced by drugs and (sexual) Sentiment.

Scenario 5: What will happen if John finds out Sherlock is capable of pretending a relationship with someone just for a case? Inspiration: This is Sherlock’s MO after all, even in ACD canon; he loves to play roles for a case. And he does tend to underestimate women. But maybe it’s just a bit exaggerated here? ;)

[very short model running this time…]

Result: John thinks (for the umpteenth time) that Sherlock is a psychopath, but he does not see the likeness with his own marriage based on lies; not even when Sherlock hints about it.

Discussion: Again, bad characterization of Janine, who I think wouldn’t be stupid enough to let Sherlock into CAM tower knowing fully well that CAM is present. Drugs. Underestimating women.

Scenario 6: What will happen if Sherlock ‘takes one more step’? Inspiration: There’s a plethora of action movies and games with ninja assassins and spies, and the black-clad ninjas often climb buildings and walls on their missions. So ‘Mary’s gear and behaviour at CAM tower wouldn’t be particularly hard for Sherlock to dream up; especially since there has been a lot of assassins in this show already to use as inspiration.

But I also believe there might be a particular movie inspiring Sherlock for the whole Shooting Drama scenario with ‘Mary’: “Selena” from 1997. This film, starring Jennifer Lopez, is entirely based on a real life story about the famous Tejano singer Selena, who was murdered by her (supposed) friend Yolanda Saldívar. As I explained in this addition to a post from @elldotsee, the name “Yolanda” is repeated 4 times in the scene in TEH where Sherlock meets ‘Mary’ for the first time. Yolanda shot Selena in the shoulder, and she died of blood loss on her way to the hospital. According to Wikipedia (my bolding), "The defense attorney argued the shooting was accidental, but the prosecution pointed out that Saldívar, a trained nurse, did not call 911 or try to help Selena after she was shot."

So let’s compare this movie with the events in HLV. I don’t think the actual shooting is included in the film, but this is Selena being taken to hospital:

And here is Sherlock being taken to hospital:

The stretcher is pretty similar, which could of course be a coincidence. But look at Selena (as played by J.Lo, who by the way received a Golden Globe nomination for this film):

Aren’t these images a little bit too similar for a mere coincidence? And since Sherlock is exceptionally into crime cases, I think it’s not unlikely that he might have found interest in this movie based on a famous IRL crime case…

[scenario running time is very short at first, but then the simulation goes on and on and on…]

Result: When Sherlock takes the step, ‘Mary’ (= heteronormativity) – who is now suddenly a full-feathered ninja assassin - literally tries to kill Sherlock, which might feel just the same to him in the suicidal state I believe he is in at this point (X). But then he realizes that John will ‘cry buckets and buckets’, and that John’s life will definitely be in danger. So he struggles to stay alive.

Discussion: I think this whole debacle is basically about Sherlock’s heart-break after ‘Marry Watson’, interpreted as a shot to the heart. While the real reason for his critical state might be an overdose of drugs, his mind translates this to a shooting Drama. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘Mary’ is a nice person, but I do believe the ninja bit is exaggerated. To ‘take one more step’ might in this case have meant a possible step towards a same-sex relationship with John. But Sherlock doesn’t consciously recognize this possibility, so in this scenario it’s depicted as if he takes one more step towards disarming ‘Mary’ (which would metaphorically be almost the same thing, if ’Mary’ stands for the hetero norm). In my sub-textual reading, this is also about heteronormativity (=’Mary’) firming its grip on Media  (=CAM). But Sherlock isn’t ready to realize this just yet, so he blames Love (=Lady Smallwood) due to his fear of emotions. In a textual reading, however, this could also mean that Sherlock has deduced that Media has some sh*t on ‘Mary’ which might indirectly threaten John. In either case, he still tries to stop ‘Mary’ from killing CAM. 

On the surface, Sherlock probably believes that ‘John is in danger’ is connected to the risk of ‘Mary’ getting desperate and trying to kill John too. But his subconscious might indeed realize that John would be suicidal too if he lost Sherlock again. And now we’re even ‘officially’ inside Sherlock’s mind palace, so we know - most of the time at least - that the characters that now show up (Jim alive and kept in a padded cell, Molly slapping Sherlock to make him focus, Mycroft giving advice etc.) aren’t actually ‘real’. 

Scenario 7: What will happen if Sherlock ‘tells John’ [the truth]?

Inspiration: Sherlock and John have a long history of not telling each other important stuff, especially Sherlock. So this threat from ‘Mary’, when Sherlock is hospitalized, might be well-founded in his own fear of talking about issues involving strong emotions. 

We’re not told exactly what Sherlock can’t tell John, but I assume she means ‘the Truth’. In this scenario Sherlock depicts it as ‘Mary’ not wanting her husband to know about her shady assassin past. 

[running, running, looong running, involving Sherlock not only telling, but showing John the truth about ‘Mary’…]

Result: As anyone might have predicted, John gets devastated; he's out of his mind with repressed anger. 

But the scenario continues in 221B, where John directs his fury not only at ‘Mary’, but - strangely - also at Sherlock, the reason for which is left unclear. Is it for not telling John this before? Is it a ‘shoot-the-messenger’ sort of rant? In any case, John’s focus seems to be that it now turns out he’s saddled with two psychopaths instead of just the one (Sherlock). In his anger, John starts yelling at Sherlock and even threatening him, while Sherlock – on the brink of another heart collapse - keeps making excuses for ‘Mary’, claiming that she actually saved his life (!) by not going for a head shot, and he claims (with a lame piece of evidence that wouldn’t hold water in any decent court room) that ‘Mary’ actually called the ambulance for him.

Discussion: But why is the focus of John’s reaction on ‘Mary’s’ lying rather than her shooting and almost killing Sherlock? Why isn’t his friend’s life the most important thing here? I think this characterization of John in Sherlock’s scenario is horribly biased and entirely absurd; Dr. Watson would NEVER treat his beloved friend this way - wasting time ranting on ‘Mary’ for lying, while Sherlock was dying from a re-opened shot wound. Especially judging by John’s reaction when he thought Sherlock was dead in TRF. 

The real explanation for this whole ‘don’t-tell-John’ business might rather be quite mundane, but highly dramatized in Sherlock’s Mind Theatre. I believe that telling John ‘the Truth’ might mean, in Sherlock’s subconscious, telling him how he really feels about him. The thought of which is still horrifying to Sherlock. But since Sherlock isn’t in touch with his own feelings yet, this is what his drug-addled brain comes up with instead. Heteronormative bias. Drugs. Sentiment.

I could also think of another possible incriminating fact appearing in Sherlock’s subconscious: What happens if Sherlock tells John about his earlier deduction that John’s wife is pregnant with someone else’s child? This seems to fit with ‘Mary’s excuse for shooting Sherlock instead of accepting his help on the ‘case’ with CAM’s blackmail: “Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever”. 

I’ll try to explore this idea in a future meta about ‘Mary’s lies. But it could also be that ‘Mary’ is a stand-in for Sherlock in this scene; if murder is a metaphor for falling in love, Sherlock might believe that he would lose John forever if he told John the truth about his real feelings for him. 

Scenario 8: What will happen with John’s marriage, now that he knows about ‘Mary’s secret? Inspiration: This scenario is so absurd that I strongly suspect it’s not based upon Sherlock’s real memories of John (which would be irrelevant anyway, since they have never before experienced a situation like this). It could of course be based upon lots of romantic, stereotype movies where two lovers reconcile in a tearful embrace. 

But it could also be reflecting some childhood event (perhaps at Christmas) in Sherlock’s own family, where his parents agree to gloss over their problems, whatever they might have been, instead of dealing with them. One possibility is suggested in the final part of @sagestreet’s entirely brilliant Follow-the-dogs meta series: that ‘Redbeard’ is basically about Sherlock’s Dad having had a love affair with a man while at the same time being homophobic about it, which has created a trauma in Sherlock. And this also has an important bearing on ACD on a meta level. (I absolutely love this theory! @sagestreet calls it ‘speculation’, but I think he’s rather ‘connecting the sub-textual dots’ hinted at in the whole series to deduce Sherlock’s possible childhood trauma).

[running, running, loong running, involving a distorted time line interlaced with the previous scenario and Sherlock acting as an odd sort of matchmaker, trying to find excuses for ‘Mary’ and doing something very uncharacteristic: inviting John and ‘Mary’ to celebrate Christmas with his own family…]

Result: John doesn’t talk to ‘Mary’ for a long time, but after Sherlock’s persuasion he decides to grudgingly ‘forgive’ her and keeps living together with her, cowed under her dominance and not even knowing her real name. But John’s sense of ‘family duty’ kicks in here, and makes him stay with ‘Mary’ and father the kid. A ‘nice’ and ‘Christmassy’ solution based on lies and, as John says about Sherlock’s parents: “A fine example of married life”.

Discussion: I’ve always wondered what’s so ‘fine’ about Sherlock’s parents’ relationship, though; that Mummy Holmes keeps criticizing her husband in front of others and tells him he’s not even allowed to be humming to himself? That Daddy Holmes made her give up her entire mathematical career ‘for children’? Is this Sherlock’s past family Christmas trauma playing in here? In any case I think it’s a completely awful characterization, that John Watson would ever forgive someone who tried to kill Sherlock and be willing to start a family with them – especially if this person doesn’t show even a shred of remorse over the whole thing. And what does the idea that Sherlock would be willing to drug down his whole family represent? The frustration of a child exposed to his parents’ constant bickering? I don’t know, but drugs and Sentiment - devastating Sentiment – are most likely playing in here.

Scenario 9: What will happen if Media - CAM - start prying into ‘Mary’ Watson’s doings? Inspiration: On the surface, this is about ‘Mary’s secret past; a truly fantastical story about the crimes of a façade-climbing ninja assassin, which CAM threatens to reveal. A veritable ‘Bond adventure’ it would be; a dramatic action movie. But is there perhaps some ‘mundane’ and therefor more likely topic that Media usually loves to speculate about (because it makes lots of money)? Yes I think there is: ‘scandals’; particularly those involving celebrities and their love life. And Sherlock must be painfully aware of this since what happened in TRF:

Imagine what a field day the press would have, for example, speculating about ‘Mary’ cheating on earlier ‘confirmed bachelor’ but now ‘happily married’ John Watson! Imagine what they would make of him not actually being the father of her child, and what this could mean regarding his association with the famous Sherlock Holmes? It would be TRF all over again - but worse this time; the ‘beard’, the ‘façade’ would fall. For the record: I think the main reason why Sherlock stayed away from John for two years was because in TRF media had started speculating about John’s and Sherlock’s relationship and thereby John’s sexual orientation, which John seemed to take very badly. So this scenario could be far more based on Sherlock’s memories of TRF than anything else.

[running, running, looong running of the model this time…]

Result: Media - CAM in Sherlock’s scenarios - now have a leverage on them all; ‘Mary’s secret revealed publicly (whether ‘assassin’ or ‘cheater’) would harm John, which would harm Sherlock, which would harm Mycroft (by association) and might ultimately harm the whole country. Yes - Sherlock is a real drama queen! ;) So the only solution he sees is to kill CAM immediately. In fact, he’d do anything to stop this exposure of John in media.

Discussion: In TSoT, I think Sherlock’s subconscious makes three devastating deductions regarding John (subconscious because in two of these cases he emphasizes that this was one more deduction than he was expecting, and in the other one he drops his glass from the impact of the realization):

1) That a ‘recently divorced doctor’ has ‘erectile dysfunction’. But this might actually be about John, if Sherlock’s subconscious picked up that John might have a bit of a bedroom problem with his newly wed wife.

2) That John is a Mayfly Man; he has been dating a string of lovers to cover up something else. This, together with 1., could make Sherlock suspect that even John’s whole marriage is a cover-up, a façade; these two guys aren’t really into each other, but the marriage protects John from being ‘outed’.   3) That ‘Mary’ is pregnant, which seems to be complete news to John. But if he - a doctor - has no idea he’s going to father a child, one possible explanation of this might be that the baby is actually not John’s. Which would further support deduction 1) and 2) above.

So maybe CAM’s leverage was actually what Sherlock was thinking about in Leinster Gardens? What if ‘Mary’s words here are representing Sherlock’s own fear of what would happen if John’s relationship is exposed in media? 

(Also on a meta level I think this might be important: the threat of media exposure of a gay couple in Victorian times has affected the whole characterization of Sherlock Holmes for over a century). Sherlock thinks his contact with John and his career is over (as in TRF), so he can just as well start killing people (from media, preferably ;) ). And here we have some more awful characterization - this time of Sherlock himself; suddenly he has become a murderer – a bit improper for a famous detective supposed to solve crimes, not committing them, don’t you think? And, on the whole, he acts like an idiot, making blunders that cause him to lose his cases etc. It’s the Sentiment bias again - lots and lots of it, complete with – perhaps life-long - anger, self-loathing and frustration. Poor Sherlock.

Scenario 10: What will happen with Sherlock after he flips out and kills Magnussen? Inspiration: Casablanca, a truly iconic movie from WWII. End scene where Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Rick (Humphrey Bogart) bid each other a tearful farewell at the Moroccan airport, from where Ilsa is fleeing the country with her spouse. It’s a ‘forbidden’ romance, and there are no outspoken confessions or declarations between them, no kiss; they hide their true feelings, even though they are very clearly understood. Ilsa will travel to security, Rick will stay in danger, serving his country, and Ilsa will not know if he’s dead or alive. Romantic overload.

Result: After a brief ‘solitary confinement’ in prison (a week, we learn in TAB - suspiciously close to the time I believe John and ‘Mary’ were on honeymoon after the wedding), Mycroft sends him in a private jet to a certain death in Eastern Europe, serving his country. Sherlock takes farewell of John at the tarmac and leaves him in ‘Mary’s hands. He’s about to tell John something important (like a love declaration), but changes his mind and jokes the whole thing away. They shake hands and Sherlock flies off, crying, probably thinking he’s seen John for the last time. But since the issue of Moriarty isn’t resolved yet, Sherlock Holmes is called back…

Discussion: This is so obviously a rip-off from Casablanca’s ending, and such a sentimental and overly-dramatic ending of S3 that if I didn’t believe Sherlock was in a drug-induced comatose state, I’d hold him (or Moffat) responsible for succumbing his modeling to ‘the fly in the ointment’. :)) 

Awful characterization of Mycroft though; why would Sherlock’s over-protective brother have him killed rather than imprisoned? But, most importantly: What are Sherlock’s results after HLV? 

In summary, I think Sherlock’s most important conclusions after this episode are a bit depressing: 1. That John’s relationship with ‘Mary’ isn’t a very happy one, but 2. that Sherlock can’t take any ‘steps’ towards John and he can’t ‘tell’ him anything; the façade must still be kept up at any cost because 3. Media is a serious threat against them and ‘outing’ John would break him and Sherlock would lose him forever.

These scenarios I’ve suggested for HLV to test Prediction #3 may seem a bit farfetched and speculative, and the evidence may not be particularly strong for some of them, while I think they could work for others. But at least all of them make more sense to me character-wise than the presented, face-value reading. Please consider the absurdity of the alternative we’re actually given in HLV: 

That the wife of one of the protagonists is actually a façade-climbing ninja assassin who tries to kill the main character and gets away with it, without showing a shred of remorse. 

That Doctor John Watson would yell threats at his beloved best friend when he’s collapsing from a re-opened shot wound, instead of trying to help him. 

That John Watson would forgive someone – whose name he doesn’t even know - who shot and  almost killed his best friend, and then go on to raise a child with them. 

That Sherlock would let a drug-addict drug down his whole family, including a pregnant woman, at their Christmas dinner.

That the main character – the famous detective Sherlock Holmes – would become a murderer who ‘solves’ a tricky case by blowing the un-armed blackmailer’s brains out with a gun.

That his over-protective brother Mycroft would send him to a certain death in Eastern Europe rather than put him behind bars.

I intend to go on exploring this ‘scenario-running’ for the four remaining episodes, including TAB. But this meta is already ridiculously long, so instead I’ll have to use my following two installments to do this:

Hypothesis # 6: In the show’s ‘reality’, Sherlock is slowly dying, which also has implications on a meta level, and

Hypothesis # 7: By TFP Sherlock has managed to figure out some essential things about John and the importance of staying alive, and he has managed to get in touch with his own repressed emotions.

Because if Sherlock is going to find out how to save John Watson, I believe he still has a lot of things to figure out; in HLV he isn’t ready yet. ;)

Tagging some people who might be interested:

@raggedyblue @ebaeschnbliah @sarahthecoat @gosherlocked @fellshish @sagestreet @tendergingergirl @loveismyrevolution @sherlockshadow @darlingtonsubstitution @tjlcisthenewsexy @devoursjohnlock  @kateis-cakeis @csi-baker-street-babes @sectoralheterochromiairidum @mrskolesouniverse @murphysmom67 @elldotsee

[kyliafanfiction]

I don’t get how people don’t grasp that MMOs and most other online games represent an ongoing server loads on a company, as well as requiring significantly more maintenance and other ongoing costs. More than just the initial purchase cost of the game (if any) covers, in the long term.

Therefore, a company is obviously going to need to find additional revenue streams, either from requiring a monthly subscription to play at all, offering in-game currency purchasable by RL money or allowing things in-game to be bought with RL money or some sort of premium membership that allows access to bonus stuff or more content or the like. 

Now, certainly, some games are more annoying or onerous about this - that is, they make playing it free exceedingly annoying, impractical, time consuming, limited, or the like. They may do this by having ridiculous wait times for stuff to happen, or by limiting access to stuff or gating large segments of the game away, etc. Others will be annoying by allowing things that are directly purchasable or indirectly purchasable with RL money to be extremely powerful, leading to pay to win scenarios.

Others will do stuff like Lootboxes and such, which can be varying levels of annoying/onerous depending on how they’re done.

Some games do it really well, making the stuff you get with RL money pure gravy, extra stuff that may enhance your gameplay experience, sometimes even a lot, but isn’t necessary or essential to play.

Different games handle this differently, and onerousness is subjective based on what a player prioritizes, what sort of time budget they have, etc. 

But an MMO and other such games will have ongoing costs, and a company will need to find ways to pay for them. If you don’t like that basic fact then these kinds of games just quite literally aren’t for you.

[the-sl-liveperformeraddict-blog]

Why Not?

Entertainment Destinations in Second Life

Certainly the attraction to virtual worlds, of any sort, is the ability to be who you want to be, without the constraints of age, ability, financial limitations, and gravity!

In a virtual world you can dance for hours on end, in platform heels and a leather jump suit. You can zip line to the base of the virtual Grand Canyon, base jump from a high mountain in a fantasy world, parachute, fly a plane, ride a Harley through the mountains and have a romantic picnic at the summit and hundreds more experiences. Almost anything you can imagine doing in reality, is possible without risk or expense in a virtual world.

Role play is another aspect of virtual worlds. Again, whatever you can imagine, likely has a group dedicated to your imagined scenario. 

You can live in a small town in the 1950s, complete with malt shop, garage, town square, school and much more. You dress for the period, and take part in every day life of that period.  Medieval role play sims, where you can build a castle, and live like the Lord of the Manor. There are also virtual (and RL affiliated) Motorcycle Clubs, Sports Clubs, Gamer Experiences and a thriving community of Musicians and DJs who provide music and entertainment in the many Venues across the grid in Second Life. You just need to explore, and you will find something to suit your taste in Music, or entertainment from General to Adult Rated experiences. 

I am no expert on many of the Gaming and RP sims, but you will find like minded people if you explore. 

Here is the list from the:

Second Life Destination Guide

Winter Attractions (93)

Editors' Picks (33)

Featured Events (27)

Shopping Events (45)

Shop & Hop Winter Shopping Event (5)

Adventure & Fantasy (53)

Art (104)

Bars & Pubs (40)

Beaches (74)

Business (10)

Castles & Ruins (7)

Chat Hot Spots (22)

Cosmic (10)

Cyber (9)

Discussions & Communities (27)

Duran Duran (16)

Education & Nonprofits (53)

Experiences (18)

Fashion & Style (321)

Games (127)

Haunted (25)

Help & How To (52)

Home & Garden (112)

International (82)

Land & Estates (27)

LGBT Friendly (34)

Linden Realms (3)

Media, Movies & TV (8)

Memorials (9)

Miscellaneous (37)

Music (389)

Nature & Parks (101)

Pets & Animals (33)

Photogenic Spots (132)

Politics (1)

Popular Places (14)

Premium (35)

Real Life (50)

Rides & Mazes (16)

Role-playing Communities (237)

Romance (81)

Sailing & Boating (26)

Science & Technology (13)

Second Life Origins (16)

Spirituality & Belief (22)

Sports & Hobbies (33)

Strange & Mysterious (17)

Surfing (9)

Underwater (11)

Wilderness (7)

Zombies (3)

Adults Only (183)

Animations (18)

Clothing (137)

Gadgets (21)

Shoes (19)

Skins & Shapes (36)

Hair (19)

Jewelry (12)

Tattoos & Accessories (39)

General Games (62)

Skill Gaming Regions (58)

Creator Resources (11)

Newcomer Friendly Spots (29)

Sandboxes (11)

Freebie Spots (4)

Homes & Buildings (35)

Furnishings & Decor (40)

Gardens & Landscaping (32)

Other Languages (4)

Turkish (2)

Spanish (12)

Russian (4)

Portuguese (12)

Polish (2)

Korean (1)

Japanese (8)

Italian (5)

German (19)

French (6)

Arabic (1)

Country & Folk (16)

Electronic & Dance (64)

Indie & Alternative (13)

Jazz & Blues (36)

Live Musician Spots (51)

Pop Music (43)

Hip-Hop, R&B, Reggae & Salsa (16)

Rock & Metal (69)

Cafes & Cabarets (14)

Live DJ Spots (72)

Premium Gifts (5)

Premium Sandboxes (20)

Racer's Gulch (4)

Premium Flight Zones (3)

Premium Hunts (3)

Vampire (14)

Steampunk (11)

Fantasy (48)

Historical (47)

Pirates (6)

Sci-Fi (28)

Urban/Noir (49)

Wedding (11)

Romantic Spots (88)

Adult Clubs & Entertainment (66)

Adult Fashions & Commerce (6)

Adult Role-playing Areas (64)

Adult Arts & Culture (11)

Adult Newcomer Friendly (14)

Read Next: You Don’t Have to be Human in Second Life

[scentedbeardgarden]

Data Analytics courses

Data Analytics courses

This Micro Masters program is a series of graduate level courses in data science, designed by professors of University of California, San Diego and delivered online via edX. It is a very immersive program that can help to gain critical skills needed to advance as a data scientist. It aims to develop an in-depth understanding of the mathematical and computational tools that form the basis of data science and usage of those tools to make data-driven business decisions. Courses on the Approved List under Interdisciplinary Data Science include subject matter courses and courses that require substantial interpretation of data and report writing. Students completing the Certificate will be presented with an official certificate document and will be free to use this credential on a CV, resume or application for advanced study. The program is designed for data scientists who can manipulate data and gain insights to detect patterns.

Many of these certifications require quite a bit of studying and memorization. However, if you’ve already dedicated yourself to a data scientist career, chances are good that you’ve already learned many of the underlying concepts, and/or worked with software that operates on similar principles. That means companies are paying top dollar for data scientists, and having certifications helps when negotiating for higher compensation.

Finally, to understand statements about the probability of a candidate winning, you will learn about Bayesian modeling. At the end of the course, we will put it all together to recreate a simplified version of an election forecast model and apply it to 2016 election. This course will show you how inference and modeling can be applied to develop the statistical approaches that make polls an effective tool and we'll show you how to do this using R.

A PGP in Business Analytics, however, has courses on basics of statistical modeling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and text mining related to relevant business problems and used by business managers across different industries. There are different elements to data science courses that vary based on how the individual wishes to apply the knowledge and the career path they would like to go on. We currently have 14 collaborative master’s, and doctoral data science courses that students can choose to attend after successfully completing their PGP data science certification with INSOFE in India.

Data Analytics courses

This course focuses on graphical techniques for data visualization that assist in the extraction of meaning from datasets. This involves the design and development of efficient tools for the exploration of large and often complex information domains. Applications of visualization are broad, including computer science, geography, the social sciences, mathematics, science and medicine, as well as architecture and design. The course will cover all aspects of visualization including fundamental concepts, algorithms, data structures, and the role of human perception. This course gives a basic exposition of the goals and methods of data mining and data warehouses, including concepts, principles, architectures, algorithms, implementations, and applications.

Our industry's real case scenarios based and expert’s led training don’t just expose you with the skills, they expose you to the fundamentals that are required for pursuing a fulfilling professional IT career. The purpose of this certificate is to provide an introduction to the concepts, tools and techniques used in data science, and their relevance within an actuarial context. With increased digital access to data and the development of powerful, but inexpensive, computing, in the 21st century the formulation and evaluation of public policy is more and more reliant on the analysis of data. This certificate seeks to prepare students for careers where data analysis plays a central role. This course is designed to help you learn how deep learning really works and how it can be used on anything.

The Certificate in Data Science provides you with the knowledge to draw conclusions on data reliably and robustly. This course will help you learn how Reinforcement Learning solutions help solve real-world problems through trial-and-error interaction by implementing a complete RL solution from beginning to end. The USP of this course is that throughout the certification, you will analyze a research question of your choice and summarize your insights. Overall, an excellent project-based course to learn something useful in just 2 hours. The is a great Coursera course to learn how to use Excel to prepare and analyze your data which is a great skill to have for any Data Scientist or Data Analyst in the world. In this project, you will work with the COVID19 dataset, published by John Hopkins University, which consists of the data related to the cumulative number of confirmed cases, per day, in each Country.

A certification might be used to train on some of the latest tools or techniques of data management, or might be used to gain the specific expertise required to advance careers or increase earning potential. This is one of the courses that will probably stay with me for a significant amount of time. The platform provides a unique opportunity to try hands-on simultaneously with the coursework in an almost real-life coding example. Besides, learning to use algebra, tech

system and Git is a good refresher for anyone planning to start or stay in technology. I specifically like the MNIST example and the depth to which it goes in explaining each and every line of code. As demand for data science developer soars, individuals can grasp this excellent opportunity to get certified in data sciences.

A working professional with 3-4 years of work experience or an engineer with good credentials can opt to pursue an executive program in data science such as our PGP programs in data science, business analytics or computational data science. However, if an individual is applying to pursue a more advanced degree in data science, then the academic qualifications would need to match the program level. For instance, a doctoral degree requires that an individual have a master's degree prior to working on a PhD research thesis. Similarly, a program like the DBA also accounts for the professional experience in addition to a master's degree. You can reach us at: ExcelR- Data Science, Data Analytics, Business Analytics Course Training Bangalore Address:49, 1st Cross, 27th Main, Behind Tata Motors, 1st Stage, BTM Layout, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560068 Phone: 096321 56744 Directions: Data Analytics courses Email:enquiry@excelr.com

[sciforce]

Reinforcement Learning and Asynchronous Actor-Critic Agent (A3C) Algorithm, Explained

While supervised and unsupervised machine learning is a much more widespread practice among enterprises today, reinforcement learning (RL), as a goal-oriented ML technique, finds its application in mundane real-world activities. Gameplay, robotics, dialogue systems, autonomous vehicles, personalization, industrial automation, predictive maintenance, and medicine are among RL's target areas. In this blog post, we provide a concrete explanation of RL, its applications, and Asynchronous Actor-Critic Agent (A3C), one of the state-of-the art algorithms developed by Google's DeepMind.

Key Terms and Concepts

Reinforcement learning refers to the type of machine learning technique enabling an agent to learn to interact with an environment (area outside the agent's borders) by trial and error using reward (feedback from its actions and experiences). The agent seeks ways to maximize the reward via interacting with the environment instead of analyzing the data provided. The agent is a learning controller taking actions in the environment and receives feedback in the form of reward.

The environment, space where the agent gets everything needed from a given state. The environment can be static or dynamic, and its changes can be stochastic and deterministic correspondingly. It is usually formulated as Markov decision process (MDP), a mathematical framework for decision-making development.

However, real-world situations often do not convey information to commit a decision (some context is left behind the currently observed scene). Hence, the Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) framework comes on the scene. In POMDP the agent needs to take into account probability distribution over states. In cases where it’s impossible to know that distribution, RL researchers use a sequence of multiple observations and actions to represent a current state (i.e., stack of image frames from a game) to better understand a situation. It makes possible to use RL methods as if we are dealing with MDP.

The reward is a scalar value that agents receive from the environment, and it depends on the environment’s current state (St ), the action the agent has performed grounding on the current state (At ), and the following state of the environment (St+1):

Policy (π) stands for an agent’s strategy of behavior at a given time. It is a mapping from the state to the actions to be taken to reach the next state. Speaking formally, it is a probability distribution over actions in a given state, meaning the likelihood of every action in a particular state. In short, policy holds an answer to the “How to act?” question for an agent.

State-value function and action-value function are the ways to assess the policy, as RL aims to learn the best policy. Value function V holds an answer to the question “How good current state is?”, namely an expected return starting from the state (S) and following policy (π).

Sebastian Dittert defines the action-value of a state as “the expected return if the agent chooses action A according to a policy π.” Correspondingly, it is the answer to “How good current action is?”

Thus, the goal of an agent is to find the policy () maximizing the expected return (E[R]). Through the multiple iterations, the agent’s strategy becomes more successful.

One of the most crucial trade-offs for RL is balancing between exploration and exploitation. In short, exploration in RL aims at collecting experience from new, previously unseen regions. It potentially holds cons like a risk, nothing new to learn, and no guarantee to get any useful further information. On the contrary, exploitation updates model parameters according to gathered experience. In its turn, it does not provide any new data and could not be efficient in case of scarce rewards. An ideal approach is making an agent explore the environment until being able to commit an optimal decision.

Reinforcement Learning vs. Supervised and Unsupervised Learning

Comparing RL with AI planning, the latter does cover all aspects, but not the exploration. It leads to computing the right sequence of decisions based on the model indicating the impact on the environment.

Supervised machine learning involves only optimization and generalization via learning from the previous experience, guided with the correct labels. The agent is learning from its experience based on the given dataset. This ML technique is more task-oriented and applicable for recognition, predictive analytics, and dialogue systems. It is an excellent option to solve the problems having the reference points or ground truth.

Similarly, unsupervised machine learning also involves only optimization and generalization but having no labels referring to the environment. It is data-oriented and applicable for anomaly and pattern discovery, clustering, autoencoders, association, and hyper-personalization pattern of AI.

Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) Algorithm

The A3C algorithm is one of RL's state-of-the-art algorithms, which beats DQN in few domains (for example, Atari domain, look at the fifth page of a classic paper by Google Deep Mind). Also, A3C can be beneficial in experiments that involve some global network optimization with different environments in parallel for generalization purposes. Here is the magic behind it:

Asynchronous stands for the principal difference of this algorithm from DQN, where a single neural network interacts with a single environment. On the contrary, in this case, we've got a global network with multiple agents having their own set of parameters. It creates every agent's situation interacting with its environment and harvesting the different and unique learning experience for overall training. That also deals partially with RL sample correlation, a big problem for neural networks, which are optimized under the assumption that input samples are independent of each other (not possible in games).

Actor-Critic stands for two neural networks — Actor and Critic. The goal of the first one is in optimizing the policy (“How to act?”), and the latter aims at optimizing the value (“How good action is?”). Thus, it creates a complementary situation for an agent to gain the best experience of fast learning.

Advantage: imagine that advantage is the value that brings us an answer to the question: “How much better the reward for an agent is than it could be expected?” It is the other factor of making the overall situation better for an agent. In this way, the agent learns which actions were rewarding or penalizing for it. Formally it looks like this:

Q(s, a) stands for the expected future reward of taking action at a particular state

V(s) stands for the value of being in a specific state

Challenges and Opportunities

Reinforcement learning’s first application areas are gameplay and robotics, which is not surprising as it needs a lot of simulated data. Meanwhile, today RL applies for mundane tasks like planning, navigation, optimization, and scenario simulation in various verticals chains. For instance, Amazon used it for their logistics and warehouse operations’ optimization and for developing autonomous drone delivery.

Simultaneously, RL still poses challenging questions for industries to answer later. Given its exploratory nature, it is not applicable in some areas yet. Here are some reasons:

Meanwhile, RL seems to be worth time and resources investment as industry players like Amazon show. Just give it some time, since investment in knowledge always requires it.

[hoggywarty]

Interest Check

The basic premise: 100 years have passed since the final battle of the Second Wizarding World. Everyone is celebrating a la Voldemort's first defeat with a whole lot of whimsical things happening all over Britain and the rest of Europe. The International Confederation of Wizards debates over amendments to the Statute of Secrecy with some radicals lobbying for an abolishment of the Statue altogether. The Triwizard Tournament is being revived once more and surely without any Dark Lord or Death Eaters lurking in the background things will go as planned without a single death or major mishap. Side note: If you like everything but the plot, please tell me! Honestly, it's only the first idea that I've come up with but all my others feel lame. If you'd like to have an aging up plot but have an idea you like better on the jumping off platform, don't hesitate to share. Rundown on operations: 1) Everyone writes up a pretty basic application and gets sorted. New members MUST start as an eleven-year-old but can apply for a second student after a certain number of posts or as a professor/important adult after a significantly more number of posts. There are always exceptions to the rules so people who really DO NOT want to start as children can write up very lengthy apps for adult characters and apply for a special exception. 2) After an application is posted, the Sorting Hat will reply one of three ways, an official judgement (i.e. the character’s house), suggestions between two, or some questions to ask the character so the Hat can be sure of making the correct decision. Sorting will not be an arbitrary decision. Writers applying for older characters will have a section in their app where they can choose to write out their own sorting or the reasoning behind the House choice. 3) After a to-be-determined amount of time, characters will age up, and a new term will start. Older students may apply to become Prefects by reaching a certain activity and filling out an application form with links to threads where the character shows exemplary behavior. On the flip side, characters may also request detentions and a professor will start a thread with some sort of fun activity (for the writer, not the character) to do. Head Boy and Girl will be chosen via voting - this position will make sense IC. These will not be mod positions. Graduated students apply for jobs within the wizarding world by submitting IC work posts within their chosen profession. 4) Class scenarios will be posted for optional fun-group threads and quidditch and clubs will be available to add to the "Hogwarts" experience. Characters will write try-out posts at the beginning of each new term for Quidditch and players will be chosen based on IC skill, quality of the post, and activity level. Sometimes, everyone might make it on the roster even if half the team sucks just because there aren't enough good players - just like real life. Dueling Tournaments will be held every term with students matched up randomly based on year level (split up according to number of entries). Both Quidditch and duel winners will be decided on BEFORE the IC thread (tbd: dice rolling, coin flipping, or RPS) and writers can decide together how they want to achieve that end result or just wing it. Other clubs are more than welcome and will be added on a by-request basis. (I mean I'll say yes, but I like the formality of a request just so I know it exists and we can make its own little forum for meetings and whatnot.) 5) I plan on having a new plot every year, though some will be more elaborate than others. How dark/mature or light/fluffy will largely depend on the characters and the attitudes of the writers, though I'm hoping to alternate between serious and whimsical to keep things fresh. Some notes: - The Triwizard events will probably be NPC'd and other random events and challenges will pop up around Hogwarts for other students to try their hand. Might trash the Triwizard Tournament and just do a whimsical "the castle is celebrating too" kind of thing. -All the application processes are to help people figure out their characters and plots before having to commit to an IC interaction and to help staff not overlook anyone they might not personally write with. Everyone will be able to read the applications, so hopefully, this will help cut down on favoritism, intentional or otherwise. - For now, I'm thinking of focusing the site in and around Hogwarts and just keeping the ICW as more of a backdrop, but if a lot of people show interest in what's going on in the wizarding world and international community, then I'll put more thought into those as well. - I think word counts and post requirements are dumb. Keeping up with your plots and threads should be enough incentive to post and I don't believe in punishments. If a term ends, the character will age up along with the rest of the class. If we ever get to the point where we need to clear up space, I'll contact writers who haven't been around in a while before deleting characters or archiving threads. The only post or activity requirements will be for positions within the site that will affect other characters (i.e. prefects, professors, quidditch captains, etc.). No one is going to get booted from these positions without prior contact and RL interferences/hiatuses will be respected because I expect all writers to respect each other. If you know you won't be around for a while, consider having your character appoint someone to take their place in whatever position your character is meant to be filling and create an IC reason for your character taking a step back from their responsibilities.

[nicolasmatamoros6675]

Telescopic Booms Market Analysis & Forecast with 2020

Telescopic Booms Market: Introduction

Telescopic booms offer aerial work platforms wherein the boom sections extend telescopically. Telescopic booms are also known as ‘stick’ booms, attributed to their straight, stick-like appearance.

Telescopic booms provide greater horizontal outreach, as compared to that offered by any other type of aerial platform. This, in turn is anticipated to fuel the demand for telescopic booms and consequently, drive the market.

Key drivers of Telescopic Booms Market

Rapid economic developments across the globe in terms of road and infrastructure development are anticipated to drive the global telescopic booms market. For instance, smart city projects initiated by the Government of India to improve connectivity between rural and urban areas are propelling road infrastructure development consistently. Telescopic booms offer aerial platform for areas with limited access in construction, road building, and bridge work. This, in turn, is anticipated to boost the global telescopic booms market.

Rapid expansion of the logistics industry is likely to increase preference toward warehouses. Telescopic booms are required for in house maintenance jobs such as painting and inspection applications in warehouses, which in turn is driving the global telescopic booms market.

Increase in demand for equipment that provide aerial work platform in rugged and remote worksite is expected to drive the global telescopic booms market. For instance, Terex Corporation has launched a telescopic boom under the brand ‘Genei’. It is enabled with four-wheel drive (4WD) and active oscillating axles to enhance productivity by offering a combination of maximum height and outreach at rugged and unimproved worksite with maximum terrainability and traction.

Most developed and developing countries are enacting stringent regulations regarding vehicle emissions, which are likely to prompt players in the telescopic booms market to adopt alternate fuel technology such as electric propulsion systems. For instance, CAFÉ regulations, heavy-duty vehicles regulations enacted in Europe and the U.S. are mandating telescopic boom players to enhance fuel-efficiency of their vehicles. This, in turn, is anticipated to offer significant opportunity to players engaged in the development and production of electric telescopic booms, thereby driving the global telescopic booms market.

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Asia Pacific to hold prominent share of global telescopic booms market

In terms of region, the global telescopic booms market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific has presence of robust expanding economies including China, Japan, India, and South Korea. Expansion of the e-commerce industry coupled with the presence of well-established supply chain network catering to the shipbuilding industry, automobile production, and heavy machinery manufacturing is boosting the demand for heavy-duty vehicles for material handling and cargo transportation. This has led Asia Pacific to account for a prominent share of the global telescopic booms market.

However, the imposition of lockdown across the globe owing to the coronavirus pandemic is estimated to hamper the global telescopic booms market in 2020

Key Players Operating in Telescopic Booms Market

The global telescopic booms market is highly concentrated due to the owing of top manufacturers. A few key players operating in the global telescopic booms market are:

Dutz-Fhr

D

Dn nfrr

JLG Industries

Lbhrr

Manlift Group

Wkr Nun

kk

ntu

rl

ultt

LAAS

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Global Telescopic Booms Market: Research ScopeGlobal Telescopic Booms Market, by Product Type

High Reach Telescopic Booms

Heavy Lift Telescopic Booms

Global Telescopic Booms Market, by End-use Industry

Construction

Agriculture

Mines and Quarries

Others

Global Telescopic Booms Market, by Region

U.S.

Canada

Germany

France

U.K.

Italy

Spain

Rest of Europe

China

Japan

India

ASEAN

Rest of Asia Pacific

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of Latin America

GCC

South Africa

Rest of Middle East & Africa

This study by TMR is all-encompassing framework of the dynamics of the market. It mainly comprises critical assessment of consumers' or customers' journeys, current and emerging avenues, and strategic framework to enable CXOs take effective decisions.

Our key underpinning is the 4-Quadrant Framework EIRS that offers detailed visualization of four elements:

Customer Experience Maps

Insights and Tools based on data-driven research

Actionable Results to meet all the business priorities

Strategic Frameworks to boost the growth journey

The study strives to evaluate the current and future growth prospects, untapped avenues, factors shaping their revenue potential, and demand and consumption patterns in the global market by breaking it into region-wise assessment.

The following regional segments are covered comprehensively:

North America

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America

The Middle East and Africa

The EIRS quadrant framework in the report sums up our wide spectrum of data-driven research and advisory for CXOs to help them make better decisions for their businesses and stay as leaders.

Below is a snapshot of these quadrants.

1. Customer Experience Map

The study offers an in-depth assessment of various customers’ journeys pertinent to the market and its segments. It offers various customer impressions about the products and service use. The analysis takes a closer look at their pain points and fears across various customer touchpoints. The consultation and business intelligence solutions will help interested stakeholders, including CXOs, define customer experience maps tailored to their needs. This will help them aim at boosting customer engagement with their brands.

2. Insights and Tools

The various insights in the study are based on elaborate cycles of primary and secondary research the analysts engage with during the course of research. The analysts and expert advisors at TMR adopt industry-wide, quantitative customer insights tools and market projection methodologies to arrive at results, which makes them reliable. The study not just offers estimations and projections, but also an uncluttered evaluation of these figures on the market dynamics. These insights merge data-driven research framework with qualitative consultations for business owners, CXOs, policy makers, and investors. The insights will also help their customers overcome their fears.

3. Actionable Results

The findings presented in this study by TMR are an indispensable guide for meeting all business priorities, including mission-critical ones. The results when implemented have shown tangible benefits to business stakeholders and industry entities to boost their performance. The results are tailored to fit the individual strategic framework. The study also illustrates some of the recent case studies on solving various problems by companies they faced in their consolidation journey.

4. Strategic Frameworks

The study equips businesses and anyone interested in the market to frame broad strategic frameworks. This has become more important than ever, given the current uncertainty due to COVID-19. The study deliberates on consultations to overcome various such past disruptions and foresees new ones to boost the preparedness. The frameworks help businesses plan their strategic alignments for recovery from such disruptive trends. Further, analysts at TMR helps you break down the complex scenario and bring resiliency in uncertain times.

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The report sheds light on various aspects and answers pertinent questions on the market. Some of the important ones are:

1. What can be the best investment choices for venturing into new product and service lines?

2. What value propositions should businesses aim at while making new research and development funding?

3. Which regulations will be most helpful for stakeholders to boost their supply chain network?

4. Which regions might see the demand maturing in certain segments in near future?

5. What are the some of the best cost optimization strategies with vendors that some well-entrenched players have gained success with?

6. Which are the key perspectives that the C-suite are leveraging to move businesses to new growth trajectory?

7. Which government regulations might challenge the status of key regional markets?

8. How will the emerging political and economic scenario affect opportunities in key growth areas?

9. What are some of the value-grab opportunities in various segments?

10. What will be the barrier to entry for new players in the market?