The pen is mightier than the sword

In May 2016, an odd ad went viral on social media including Linkedin. See below:

Ad as making the rounds on social media

Snopes does not have this researched yet, but I did find a post on Mybroadband (warning they use canvas fingerprinting)"

"When asked about the photos, Samsung provided the following statement:

The alleged typo on a Galaxy Note 10.1 billboard, of course, is fake. Attached is the actual photo from Cromford Road, London as well as the link on Google maps of the actual site below."

Ad provided by Samsung

Channel 24 and Sowetan are adding to the buzz. I guess we will know in a few weeks. Observations:
1) Pen is mightier than the finger just sounds odd.
2) Samsung is going to need to do an after action review to figure out how this went viral without their product line Note 10.1 showing up in the penis version of the picture. Even if this was spoofed they should have caught it, added their product, and re-introduced it.

Movie sound tracks - Dan Wallin

( I had a hard time deciding whether this post should be in Leadership or Perception)

How did the movie Jaws percept the people that watched it? Sorry for the 14 second ad, but here is a Youtube clip of the famous sound. Two notes. Two notes and really bad props.

And it is a movie that changed the world, maybe not set it upside down, but if you are a shark it made a perceptible difference.

Livescience says. "Now, 35 years later, the slogan "Don't go in the water" from the movie has turned out to be a lousy PR campaign for sharks, whose numbers worldwide have been decimated due partly to the frightening and false ideas the film helped spread about them."

Here is a google search. Take a close look at the fill ins, (fill ins are the result of thousands and thousands of previous searches).

Last night I had dinner with Dan Wallin. You may have never heard of him, but he had a very illustrious career as a sound engineer. Born and raised in Los Angeles, after he got out of the Navy he made his way into broadcast radio and eventually the movies.

His focus is more on the symphonies. Should we double the brass. Are the drums coming through. And the technical issues, is there a standing wave, are two speakers out of phase. He delivers the sound. As the LATIMES reports. "The white-haired man behind the sound console is Dan Wallin, or Danny as he is widely known. At 84, he is the oldest working sound engineer in the film industry, yet his ears still rank among the sharpest around, according to his colleagues. He recognizes, often before anyone else, if the trombones should be doubled, if the saxophone is too brassy, or whether the timpani need to be taken down a notch."

The sound carries you through the movie. The music lets you know a stressful moment it about to happen. The music helps you celebrate victory. For the rest of your life, (for the rest of my life), be attentive to the music when you watch a movie and aware of how it percepts you.

Take a couple minutes to appreciate the work of John Williams and the music of Star Wars.

Twitter - She must be really popular - help grow your follower network for "free"

For some reason, I put "free" in the search box on twitter. There are a number of chatbots, (I picked this one because it has multi-lingual exposure)? offering free "followers" if you retweet their offers. des @vaporlove is also a bot. bots begetting bots.

Boy, he sure looks familiar

So I did a reverse image search.

Why did Linkedin serve it up? I don't follow Toby Dodd. Ah, one of my connections commented on the post. Was Toby percepting or pranking? Don't know. Didn't want to invest much time in this, on the surface his other posts seem legit. It is near the 30th birthday of Top Gun.

Half Human - What could possibly go wrong?

UC Davis researchers are injecting human stem cells into pigs. The goal is to create farm animals with human organs. The question of the hour is what if they create a pig, (or sheep), with human consciousness?

According to Boise State Public Radio: "The first step involves using new gene-editing techniques to remove the gene that pig embryos need to make a pancreas.

Working under an elaborate microscope, Ross makes a small hole in the embryo's outer membrane with a laser. Next, he injects a molecule synthesized in the laboratory to home in on and delete the pancreas gene inside. (In separate experiments, he has done this to sheep embryos, too.)
After the embryos have had their DNA edited this way, Ross creates another hole in the membrane so he can inject human induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS for short, into the pig embryos.
Like human embryonic stem cells, iPS cells can turn into any kind of cell or tissue in the body. The researchers' hope is that the human stem cells will take advantage of the void in the embryo to start forming a human pancreas.

Because iPS cells can be made from any adult's skin cells, any organs they form would match the patient who needs the transplant, vastly reducing the risk that the body would reject the new organ."

Self checkout - Safeway Kapaa

5/24/16 Went to the Safeway in Kapaa. The lines were pretty long, but one of the self checkouts was open, since I only had five items I decided to do it.

I had my own bag. It could not register its weight. Five times the override clerk had to say it was OK. And a bottle of Cinnamon whiskey so they had to do the age thing. The red cabbage didn't have a bar code and was not on the list of fruits and vegetables. The override clerk was gone, so we were stuck until a new clerk showed up.

Seven overrides to buy five items. My perception is that anyone with a lot of items is going to steer clear.

Short termism

The long view is in danger of extinction. More and more we focus on the new, new thing. David Armitage and Jo Guldi writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education said, "We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterized by a shortage of long-term thinking. Rising sea levels and other threats to our environment; mounting inequality; rotting infrastructure. Our culture lacks a long-term perspective."

I am not sure it is a crisis, but it is something to be aware of. I am an academic, an educator. We generally believe the three pillars of this life are:

• Teaching
• Research
• Service

But, I once read an alternate theory that suggested the three pillars are:

• Gather knowledge
• Chronicle the events of our time
• Mentoring

Similar, but different. I write a lot about the events of our time. Most commonly, it is about security, (which is about as short term as it gets), but also cultural events.

One hundred years from now will anyone remember Ashley Madison?  Will it be considered important that some number that hovers around 32 million users signed up for an infidelity web site. The institution of marriage, generally for life 100 years ago, is now transient for many people. (Don't worry I am not getting preachy, I am simply recording an event of our time).

So, what can we do? We can interview real people and document real events. For instance, just yesterday, I interviewed the founder of a small business startup that endured daily adversity for three years, because it is a real event of our time. 

According to the Smithsonian, "In every community — in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools — there are people who have knowledge and skills to share — ways of knowing and doing that often come from years of experience and have been preserved and passed down across generations. As active participants in community life, these bearers of tradition are primary sources of culture and history. They are, as folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes, "living links in the historical chain, eye witnesses to history, shapers of a vital and indigenous way of life. They are unparalleled in the vividness and authenticity they can bring to the study of local history and culture."

Through documenting their memories and stories, the past comes to life in the present, filled with vivid images of people, places, and events. And it is not only the past that we discover: we learn about the living traditions — the foodways, celebrations, customs, music, occupations, and skills — that are a vital part of daily experience. These stories, memories, and traditions are powerful expressions of community life and values. They anchor us in a larger whole, connecting us to the past, grounding us firmly in the present, giving us a sense of identity and roots, belonging and purpose."

And there is guidance on how to go about this type of knowledge gathering. They go on explain the process of the interview. And it really matters in a world of perception management. For various reasons, people are fabricating and publishing stories that are completely false, there are digital identities that don't really exist and very soon, if not now, they will be AI sentient. 

In a well received keynote I gave several years ago called 12 Laws of IT Security Power, I suggested looking at Google Trends at least once a week. But we want to balance that input to our thinking with something long term and solid. I am an occasional Wikipedia editor, but I bought a set of the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (revise that :).