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Showing posts from November, 2018

Links Nov 25 - Dec 1, 2018

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Sunday Nov 25, 2018 "Engineers and marketers often get stressed when we talk about emotion and dreams instead of rfps, features and benefits…"    seths.blog Everyone Around Him Burned. He Stayed Put, and Lived to tell The Tale:     nytimes.com "Experience shows that neither knowledge engineering nor machine learning by itself is sufficient to reach human-level AI, and a simple two-stage solution of knowledge engineering followed by machine learning is also insufficient."    homes.cs.washington.edu Gabriel Metcalf departs Spur for Australia.    sfchronicle.com 🔗🔗🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗 🔗🔗🔗 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Cassettes Afforded Prolific Song Writing

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Songwriters through the 1990s would lay down tracks and lyrics onto cassettes, and toss them in their bag, often without the case. (Screenshot from Season 2, Episode 1 "Mike Judge's 'Tales From the Tour Bus'" now streaming from Cinemax.) George Clinton fetches then-unreleased Parliament hit song "Flash Light" from his bag in an animated re-enactment from the show mentioned above. Unverified accounts estimate producer and lead singer Clinton stacked 50 vocals for the song's chorus. As recently as the publishing date of this blog post, no mass-market medium matches that of the cassette. Garageband only runs on Apple products. And these "people also searched for" results from google show people are looking for something, anything to record on: This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

After the Fires, Life Goes On

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Smoke from Northern California November wildfires drifted quickly to San Francisco within the first day. Market Street grew from two of every 20 pedestrians wearing smoke masks to 10 of 20 by week's end. With fires finally contained, smoke cleared and pedestrians refilled the streets. A brother and sister look into a record shop on their day off over the holiday weekend. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

KQED Forum Paradise Fire Roundup - 28 Minutes

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A Cal Fire firefighter monitors a burning home as the Camp Fire moves through. November 8, 2018 in Paradise, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Here's a 28-minute audio broadcast worth transcribing when time allows: Nov 21 KQED Forum An Update on the Camp Fire . The day before Thanksgiving a fill-in host from Southern California hosted on KQED Forum a Paradise Fire update, featuring: an interview with a FEMA administrator, reporters who'd filed stories from the field, and listener calls. 28 minute broadcast. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Trump in CA Today Said 'A Forest Nation', But 'Afforestation' Draws CO2 Down

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A president visited California today to talk about the importance of "A forest nation." Nobody knows what he meant, but it's a great time to mention "Afforestation" as the 15th of 80 most-effective means of reversing CO2 emissions as ranked by climate scientists the world over, edited by Paul Hawken into a book called "DrawDown" (in bookstores now! Makes a great coffee table book! Remember what you tell your kids: many politicians get in front of a parade!) <-- Intrepid blogger talking through my teeth. The DrawDown book and website describes Afforestation : Creating new forests where there were none before is the aim of afforestation. Degraded pasture and agricultural lands, or other lands corrupted from uses such as mining, are ripe for strategic planting of trees and perennial biomass. Afforestation can take a variety of forms—from seeding dense plots of diverse indigenous species to introducing a single exotic as a plantation crop, such as

Let the Digital Natives Speak

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Young, old, middle-aged. A reporter's a reporter. Irascible, obsessed, chasing sources, facing deadlines. First let's hear from the young : A young staffer on the digital side of a legacy broadcast outfit said, “All these old white men like to scream and wave their arms that journalism is dying. They say, Oh my, it’s dying, guys. But they’re the ones cutting budgets and trying to do things the same way they’ve always done things. Did that work out okay for you, guys? Shit no, it didn’t. We need to move on from how people did it in the fucking 1600s. Get over that shit . . . . I want to be like, Your model died, dude. Seriously, we need to reinvent journalism as we know it. Throw out the playbook.” -- CJR Is Mr. "Throw out the playbook" correct? Let's read on. Later in the same piece we hear from his colleagues: “I don’t want to be Pollyannaish. We’ve lost a lot of people and lost a lot of capacity. It’s scary. But I don’t sit around and pine for the old days,”

Links Nov 11-17 & Nov 18-24, 2018

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Thursday Nov 22, 2018 Students say they don't want jobs at Facebook: *   sfchronicle via nytimes.com A popular nightclub in San Francisco's Mint Plaza is set to close in 2019 as the landlord raised the rent 600 percent by leading to a tech-office tenant.    sfchronicle.com Yemen's civil war-caused hunger crisis kills 85,000 children under five.     sfchronicle.com Wednesday Nov 21, 2018 Indonesian-based owners of a Bernal Heights, San Francisco property they were caught illegally converting into a two-unit dwelling and illegally renting it out on AirBnB to renters who hosted a party that erupted in gunfire, injuring two, after which police recovered 100 bullets and shell casings, were fined just $185,000 in civil penalties.    sfchronicle.com Oakland escalates fight with developer who plans to build marine terminal for shipping coal.    sfchronicle.com Federal judge blocks Trump's ban on asylum.    sfchronicle.com Saturday Nov 17, 2018 Concrete Homes