Boxwars is a humorous medieval-inspired set of events that’s given adults the chance to play using amazing creations they made of cardboard.
Participants get together to create a full range of battle gear using nothing but reclaimed cardboard and packing supplies. Originally devised by a small group of friends over drinks, Boxwars has grown to become a global phenomenon, with teams across Europe, Australia, the United States, and Japan.
“There are no winners. We like to say that if you’re in a Boxwars – then you’ve already lost.”
Filmmaker Humza Deas created a wondrous mirrored cityscapes that are grounded in reality but also completely surreal. The track is Periphescence by Glowworm.
Reminds me a bit of previous work by another artist afridimensional called ‘Neo Tokyo Metro’
nVidia had some great reveals during CES this year. New mobile GPU’s for super-thin laptops, new Xavier SOC for autonomous driving, and major AI/machine learning platforms.
(Feb 2023 update: The original page, and website, appear to be gone. But you can find an archived copy on Internet Archive. The opportunity costs of college also is in the archive)
Getting a job you deserve is hard, yes.But, it’s not as hard as you think. Kushal Chakrabarti can prove that. Many folks think to get a better job they have to fundamentally change as a person, gain new skills, learn new habits, network for weeks, etc. Turns out, that’s not necessarily true. Instead, you should start where the data points.
Looking for the #1 most effective tip? Change the words on your resume for a +139.6% boost. You don’t even need to change all the words — it’s literally about changing the first word of each job achievement. On the other hand, look at what a second degree buys you: only a paltry +21.9% boost. It’ll cost you tens of thousands of dollars and years of effort for only a 20% increase, but you’ll get 6.4x more impact for changing a dozen words and takes you only a few minutes.
Here’s a summary of his points in order of impact:
Resume Tip:Start your job achievement sentences with (distinct) action verbs. [+139.6% BOOST]
Job Search Tip: Apply between 6am and 10am [+89.1% BOOST] – it gives you an +89.1% boost over your competition.
Job Search Tip:Apply in the first 4 days. [+64.7% BOOST] –Applying early gets you a +64.7% boost over your competition on average. (Although it can make up to an 8x difference for a single job application, most people aren’t applying at the worst possible time.)
Resume Tip:For most* people, you should add 15-20 skills, buzzwords, acronyms, etc. to your resume. This is associated with a +58.8% boost in hire-ability on average.
[*] There’s actually a really interesting effect going on here. There’s a clear, second sub-population of special folks for whom 30-40 skills, buzzwords, acronyms, etc. is the right number. More on that later.
Resume Tip:Don’t use personal pronouns in your employment section. Ever. People who used even one personal pronoun in their employment section (not the objective or professional summary section) had a -54.7% lower chance of getting an interview callback.
Resume Tip:Incorporate 1-2 leadership-oriented words every 5 sentences. Job applicants who used strong, active, leadership-words saw a +50.9% boost over the competition. Some of the words we detected as strong, active words:
communicated
coordinated
leadership
managed
organization
Resume Tip:Don’t mention more than once or twice that you’re a “team player,” “results-driven collaborator,” “supporting member”, etc. This is associated with a +50.8% hire-ability boost over the competition.
Job Search Tip:Apply on Mondays (+46.0% hireability boost). Don’t apply on Fridays or Saturdays.
Resume Tip: Every 3 sentences, use at least 1 number to demonstrate your (concrete) impact.Folks who did that saw gain a +40.2% boost over their competition.
Resume Tip: Name-drop a buzzword every 3-6 sentences. If you do that, you’ll gain a +29.3% boostover everyone else.
Resume Tip:Don’t list your graduation date if you’re older than 35. If hiring managers can’t guess your age, they can’t discriminate against you based on it. Sadly, ageism is real and the data supports it. The lesson, however, is that this is your inferred age. Hiring managers (subconsciously) guess your age based on your graduation date, how much experience you have, etc. If you don’t show your graduation date, they can’t tell how old you are. If you only have your most recent 2-3 jobs listed, they can’t tell that you started working in the 1980’s.
Job Search Tip: Except in rare scenarios, you should not go back to school for a 2nd degree just to improve your job prospects.When you factor in opportunity cost, you usually come out behind — it’s just not worth it. If you do go back, you will get a +21.9% hire-ability boost; but as we have seen, just updating your resume might get you far more than that. This is one of the lowest and most expensive in time and money ways of improving job prospects. One legitimate reason might be if you’re looking to switch careers, but get ready to start back out towards the bottom of your new field.
Babycastles is a New York nonprofit that is a mish-mash of Maker, Indie developer, and art communities. They create interesting and unique art/gaming installations – such as this Pacman version that runs on all 5 surfaces of a room. Check out their other strange and quirky projects.
Sadly, they were one of the least driver friendly cars ever – here’s a modern review of exactly this make and model. My favorite part is what you have to do in order to back up (see 9:20 in the video).
No reserve, so get your bids in today and take advantage of the very favorable US to British Pound conversion rate.
Ex-Facebook exec ‘deeply regrets’ what he helped create
Videos of more social media site creators and executives speaking out directly against what they created. They call for each person to awaken to how they can ‘program’ you and that each person should make a conscious effort to limit their use of them. Here’s what Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP, has to say now:
“People need to hard break from these tools. The short-term dopamine driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistrust. Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything they want. … You do not realize it, but you are now being programmed.”
Here’s from Sean Parker, former Facebook President:
“You’re exploiting a vulnerability of human psychology. The inventors, creators, understood this – consciously – and we did it anyway.”
I encourage you to go to TimeWellSpent and my previous article on this subject on how we can be aware of how these systems can be harmful to you emotional wellbeing and limit the more damaging influences of social media.
What is the most dangerous problem in our world today? I argue it is not drugs, war, mass shootings, growing global divisions/unrest, global warming, or even a nuclear North Korea. What problem could possibly be bigger than those? How about the control of the minds of almost every person on earth.
Hyperbole? A growing group of top-tier developers, social media executives, technologists, military threat analysts, and researchers don’t think so. They are increasingly quitting or raising red flags of how dangerous the ground has become. Many have banded together, appearing on Ted, NPR, Wired, 60 Minutes, and many other forums – founding a movement called “Time Well Spent”
So what are they saying:
I want you to imagine walking into a control room with a 100 people hunched over little dials that will control the thoughts and feelings of a billion people. This might sound like science fiction – but it actually exists today. I know because I was a design engineer at Google in one of those control rooms deciding how to ethically steer people’s thoughts. What we don’t talk about is how a handful of people at a handful of technology companies, through their choices, will steer what a billion people will think today. – Tristan Harris
Still not convinced?
Several recent foreign elections, as well as our last presidential election, demonstrated the very probable reality that elections can now be swung, influenced, or even won by last-minute internet scandals and social media barrages. Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared before congress to answer for their complicity in Russian election hacking. How are we to run elections in the future if social media scandal or outrage can be created instantly and overnight by just a few people anywhere in the world while remaining anonymous?
How much faith do we put in systems in which as few as 2 developers, with any motivation or ethical goal, can run simple bots designed to exploit the algorithms of social media sites such as Reddit and ensure they have top visibility while silencing any dissension. Results which have been repeated and published over and over again.
Others have written books about how they have engineered complete social media campaigns based on creating public outrage and then capitalizing on it. With teams as small as 5-10 people and budgets of only a few thousand dollars, they successfully generated campaigns that appeared in every national news outlet and made hundreds of thousands of dollars by posting and then counter-posting social media blitzes. All purely fabricated and designed to sell a product. They caution that the same techniques could be used for any purpose or end.
All this isn’t a call to take down Facebook, disband Google, destroy smart phones, or riot in the streets. What is a call to do is to think deeper and awaken to our vulnerability to manipulation and the potentially destructive emotional and relational forces of our technology. Most of these systems were initially created without thought to how pervasive, and vulnerable to manipulation, they could become. Their dramatic success and pervasiveness has now revealed the danger of these vulnerabilities. Devices designed for convenience are now becoming dangerously absorbing.
TimeWellSpent points out that these vulnerabilities are being exploited because they’re combined with user interfaces that use techniques of positive reinforcement and operant conditioning to keep us constantly checking, re checking, and glued to them. If they are absorbing all our attention, then they are also absorbing our thinking.
While this wasn’t as big of an issue when connectivity was limited by physical access, but in an all-the-time, 100% connected world, we must pay attention to these forces.
Time Well Spent outlines some paths forward on their website:
Design new products, devices, and core interfaces to protect our minds from constant distractions, minimize screen time, protect our time in relationships, and replace the App Store model of ‘apps’ with a marketplace of tools competing to benefit our lives and society.
Enact legislation that enforces humane business models. Models that address the purposeful use of unhealthy positive reinforcement or operant conditioning to monopolize attention. Examples: gambling like loot/reward systems in games, etc.
Bring attention and start public discussions that make consumers aware and able to recognize the difference between technology designed to extract the most attention from us and technology whose goals are aligned with our own.
This is one in my wheel house: Educate and empower engineers and technologists to build products and business models that improve society while also become advocates against ones that ruin society. Talented employees are the greatest asset of technology companies – and the ones companies are most afraid to lose. They can become powerful advocates if they recognize their collective power.
While Time Well Spent spends its time on a few ideas relating to our social well-being, I would add a few more based on the idea that change comes from within:
It is increasingly researched and documented that people who are heavy users of social media are much more prone to psychological problems such as depression, sadness, and unhealthy evaluation of their lives. Some good questions:
How many times in a day do you check social media (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc)? Be honest.
Can you go to the bathroom, wait in a coffee line, sit at a stop light, or any other waiting task without checking Facebook, Twitter, text messages, or playing a mobile phone game? How do you feel if you don’t – unsettled, irritable, anxious?
How much time are you spending each day checking social media? Be attentive to your usage and add it up. Is it more time than what you spend with a loved one, exercising, learning, or growing as a person?
Can you have a whole meal with a loved one, spouse, family, or friend without checking your phone? How’s the quality of your relationship with that person compared with 5 years ago? Are you using digital distraction to avoid relationship growth/deepening?
US News media sources are increasingly consolidating under a few giant media conglomerates. News stories and writers are increasingly only evaluated by the number of clicks they get – not to inform or educate.
Do you know the bias of your news outlet? EVERY news outlet has a bias and reputation – discover it by googling ‘news bias chart’ and start your research.
If you currently read a more ‘biased’ news source – can you go to a source at about the opposite side of the scale to read the arguments there or does it just cause you overwhelming emotions?
Do you double-check with news sources outside the US like BBC?
Do you have a healthy disbelief of the news you read until it has been fact checked by numerous sources and time – or are you a slave to immediate emotional ‘outrage’? Can you read a story that is designed to generate outrage and separate your emotional response from the facts? Can you avoid obvious click-bait articles with outrage inducing titles?
In the past, ‘Sex sells’ was the mantra. Today it is ‘Outrage sells’. How often do you read the news and become a mindless bot that re-tweets/re-posts/up votes/spreads your outrage – often without waiting to see if there is any truth, waiting for evidence to be vetted, or recognize that many of these articles are commentaries designed to get clicks – not invite informed, constructive solutions?
How often are you involved in constructive discussions that recognize the shared humanity in the other, is informed by peer-reviewed scientific data, and designed to create positive environments that encourage the generation of positive outcomes vs ones that are confrontational, destructive, or designed to humiliate/degrade/defeat those that don’t agree with you?
Do you promote critical thinking skills?
Can you critique your own viewpoints and even the stances you agree with? Can you see both the good, and the wrong in them – or are you unable to see any failings in the things you believe – sure they are infallible?
Do you almost always/immediately believe what your political party, favorite star, favorite politician, musician, comedian, or news source tells you to be true? Can you question them or what they say?
Do you understand basic logical fallacies and argumentative techniques? Can you recognize when an article or person is using them on you? Can you call out people – even those aligned with your viewpoint – for using them and being intellectually lazy or even manipulative/deceptive?
Are you more interested in being right and shutting up dissenting voice or are you focused on your shared humanity with them, the fact we come from many different backgrounds that weren’t equally privileged, and that the argument/belief is a separate, changeable thing from the inherent value and beauty of the person?
Can you hear things designed to elicit outrage and not be swept up in the emotional appeal? Can you suspend belief long enough to get facts. When the facts support action, can you take actions that actively create a positive environment for change, or do you resort to violence, intimidation, posts designed to incite angry responses, or threats?
How long can you go without checking the digital world?
Do you cultivate quiet times in your day? Are there times you let yourself be quiet, without video, music, or constantly checking texts/news/post streams?
When was the last time you let yourself get bored. Boredom is linked to creative and imaginative thinking.
If you are a person of faith, do you spend time in prayer or meditation every day? Even a fraction of the time you spend on social media?
Have you ever gone on a weekend/vacation in which you don’t turn on a single digital device or check email/threads/texts/etc?
My hope for the new year is that we all become better citizens by becoming better human beings. That starts within our hearts and with how we choose to spend our time. How do you want to spend your time this coming year?
People say that money is the root of all evil; but it’s not really true. In fact, I think it makes people look to the wrong place for a solution.
Money only becomes the tool to bad things when given motion by a human agent with a purpose and will. Money just exposes that corruption and weakness in the person, or reveals their goodness and charity.
Just like athletes that get regular drug screens, it is very prudent to put checks and balances on the flow of money. Parishes and businesses require regular audits. People entrusted with money should have procedures to protect what is entrusted to them via audits, multiple people present during counting, and similar systems help keep honest people honest and limit/expose damage when things go wrong. Rules, however, only go so far.
Formality, laws, and rules can make maleficence very difficult, but as every good bank heist movie shows, a person bent on taking something will eventually find a way. The real root of evil is the temptations in the human heart. By changing hearts, we can prevent far more problems than creating laws.
Money isn’t the root of all evil – the human heart corrupted is the root of all evil. When money becomes a tool of evil, then we can certainly take logistical and legal steps to protect us – but we more rightly can look to the human heart to make the true fix.
