Will the stark reality between Australia’s climate future and the denial, the fudging and blustering for economic and special interests finally come home to roost?
Will the stark reality between Australia’s climate future and the denial, the fudging and blustering for economic and special interests finally come home to roost?
Will our government finally be dragged kicking and screaming to join the consensus of our nearest neighbors, whose future as proud island nations reach to an inevitable, whimpering conclusion?
Will it acknowledge its contribution to our current, escalating crisis and take appropriate action or will it continue to nibble away, staring blankly ahead, irrespective of the calamities that are increasing befalling our nation?
A gas lead recovery is a fools errand that will be our nations shame and the demise of our nations pride.
WEF carried out a global poll of 11,000 young people on future skills using u-report platform.
WEF Youth Perspectives
I wish life was a game which came with instructions, but unfortunately we don’t have that roadmap that can tell us exactly what we should do to get to where we want to be.
Praise Majwafi, 22, South Africa
63% believe, given the current economic and social changes, they will have the career that they want in the future?
30% can’t afford training and its their biggest barrier to develop the skills they need to pursue career aspirations.
In Australia, which was a small sample size – don’t know what skills they need came up top.
32% job ready skill program and 28% access to on the job training would make the most difference to achieve their career goals. Thats also reflected in Australia’s small sample.
Its worth checking out the knowledge graphs – you have to create a WEF account for free, as well as easily accessible ureport
Have you noticed the upturn in the number of of radical channels popping up in Youtube search ranking recently?
I’m not a fan of Sky News due to its incessant propaganda, especially Sky After Dark which has spread disinformation around Covid, vacinnations and many other matters.
However, I’m finding it harder to get ABC and other channels in my Youtube searches. I really don’t want to be fed slanted articles and I fear what this trend does to others. I certainly am wart of what this trend has done to Americans and what it will end up doing to Australians.
The Vaccine Eligibility checker is too complex for many Australians with a level of literacy required that is beyond many.
According to the Info Access Group, 14.1 per cent of our population have very low levels of literacy, and over 40% have literacy levels below what is considered enough to get by in everyday life. So groups that are least most likely to need vaccines are the least likely to be able to complete the checker successfully.
At a time where we have not enough Pfizer in the country and AstraZeneca readily available, more should be done to make the form simpler, more accessible to the point and not confusing for Australians. There’s an understatement to say that there is a lot of streamlining for AZ that could be done, as you’ll be prompted by your doctor or nurse giving the vaccine anyway, helping you make an informed choice.
As one example, its easy to think in the below part that the Yes and No refers to do you need help deciding rather than are you willing to consider AstraZeneca – leading to you ruling yourself out.
As I try to extract more performance of my aging 2015 Macbook Pro, I finally bought an affordable external SSD to replace my old Seagate external drive to hold cache and video files while I use Adobe Creative Cloud suite to create digital content. Disk space is always a premium so if I can offload some files, without a loss of performance, I’ll be a very happy camper.
Equipment
Disk speed test tool (free) from Black Magic Design
Macbook Pro 2015 SP719 with PCIe-based flash storage, USB 3.0
Seagate 1TEAPF-500 4TB
Samsing Portable SSD T5 1TB
Results
My disk speed test results, on USB 3.0 showed that I get approx 5x’s improvement on my old Seagate SATA drive, comparable write speeds to my internal drive but a big difference on read…. maybe the value of an internal cache… The Samsung supports USB 3.1 and a max speed of 540MB/s so if you have newer computer, you may get a faster read/write than I did. As that’s as geeky as I’m interested in going… I’ll leave it there with my curiosity satisfied!
Next on my list is to try it out in a real world scenario!
Tests
Internal flash storage speed test
Max speed claimed to be 120 MB/s but I got a fraction of that in my speed test.
The result of a quick experiment using online MethaHuman Creator alpha to create a realistic human avatar. Great potential for storytelling.
Simple user interface where similar allows you to choose a base character, blend it with others and then focus on different character attributes.
Intuitive blending a base character with three othersFocusing on eye modifications
You can download it to use in Maya and and has license condition to run inside of Unreal Engine. Worth checking out for free at: https://metahuman.unrealengine.com/
Viral petition reveals more than 500 allegations of sexual assault in Australian private schools – The Guardian
We have finally arrived at a moment in history where our nation is finally listening and if we are honest with our dismal track record and willing to do more than provide media friendly genuflections, we can change the culture of Australia and protect our daughters, sisters, mothers and others of assault and rape. It’s time to listen, be angry, and act with purpose.
Viral petition reveals more than 500 allegations of sexual assault in Australian private schools – The Guardian
President Biden’s Inauguration speech analysed through IBM Watson.
President Biden’s Inauguration speech analysed through IBM Watson Personality Insights.Put speeches or tweets through this tool and see the results is pretty fascinating. Even more interesting to compare and contrast with demagogues.
President Biden’s Inauguration Speech
I used this once a few years ago as part of a workshop with a GM of Wealth divisions direct reports – the results weren’t too flattering of the GM 🙂
BIDEN – Summary You are heartfelt, analytical and strict. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are assertive: you tend to speak up and take charge of situations, and you are comfortable leading groups. And you are mild-tempered: it takes a lot to get you angry. You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of organization. You are relatively unconcerned with both achieving success and taking pleasure in life. You make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents. And you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. Of course, speechs are filtered and polished and so are not true reflections of an individual.
TRUMP
And here’s Trump’s speech put through the analyser with results you cannot believe.
TRUMP = Summary
You are analytical and heartfelt.
You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are altruistic: you feel fulfilled when helping others, and will go out of your way to do so. And you are self-controlled: you have control over your desires, which are not particularly intense.
Your choices are driven by a desire for organization.
You are relatively unconcerned with both achieving success and taking pleasure in life. You make decisions with little regard for how they show off your talents. And you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment.
Installed Big Sur on my mac laptop yesterday with its ludicrous 35Gb free space requirement for its monstrous bloat-ware.
After all I had nothing better to do, than to start a quest to free up the required room. I used GrandPerspective, a file space visualisation tool to see where there was unexpected opportunities. I painfully deleted caches and applications but eventually after much deliberating the space was won.
I also moved the install file to a secondary disk and installed from there.
Big Sur looks pretty attractive but I certainly think Apple needs to rethink how it does support installations in the future. They are hardly generous with disk space sizes.
The challenge of finding your voice and telling your story. An kinetic typography animation using the spoken word.
The challenge of finding your voice and telling your story.
Organisations are constantly striving to make the complex simple. How to engage their audience and not miss key information? How to remain authentic and retain the substance of their value proposition?
So many digital animations today have little substance, and though there is a large audience for that, there are other audiences craving something more. Audience drop off rates over time lead creatives and marketing teams down a path creating videos and animations of shorter and shorter duration with less positioning of their topic. There’s a constant tug of war trying to get the balance right. The reality is that there are markets for both and both should be well served with appropriate content. There are other influences such as target audience and media distribution channel that have to be accounted for.
In Australia an analogous example would be mainstream commercial breakfast TV versus Radio National. I would have liked to have said ABC Breakfast TV but unfortunately its adopted a very similar substance light approach as well.
This animation titled STORYTIME uses typographic kinetic animation that starts in a style from Apple’s Blink and then goes off its its own direction. I use a poem I created earlier this year to describe what my business is about, that initially I had set to a typewriter style animation effect but I think this is much better.
I’ll keep exploring the relationship of spoken word, emotion, narratives of substance as well as creativity and technology in my work. I hope you enjoy it to.
The Spoken Word 