Infoman

Member since 2017-07-15T03:50:57Z. Last seen 2025-01-02T20:05:01Z.

2729 blog posts. 128 comments.

Followers: 0 Following: 2

Posts by Infoman

• 
  

  Infoman

  Eating Out? Outwit the Bots.The Wall Street Journal 20 Jul 2024

  THE MESSAGE “Do Not Buy Reservations”—encircled in red with a slash through the center on social media, or simply voiced aloud with increasing exasperation—is a frequent refrain these days from the owners of Raoul’s Restaurant in

  New York City. They say one of the biggest problems restaurateurs grapple with now is an illicit economy that makes scoring a table at a hot restaurant a competitive and expensive task.

  Reservations at popular restaurants around the country are often snapped up by “bots” within nanoseconds of their release online. The reservation will then be listed on a virtual marketplace like Appointment Trader, often for hundreds of dollars—sometimes even upward of $1,000. Buyers are provided with the reservation details, including the name under which the reservation was made and confirmation information. The virtual market collects a percentage of each sale.

  Alice Wozniak, the manager at Raoul’s charged with spotting bot reservations, says these services can preclude the average diner from getting in the door. What’s more, unsold reservations translate to no-shows, which cause the restaurant to lose revenue and servers to lose tips. And then there is the disconnect with the clientele:

  When a reservation is traded, the restaurant loses valuable information, such as a diner’s preferences and allergies. All the while, these third parties profit from the reservations, while the restaurant does not.

  The Bot Bill

  In early June, the New York State Legislature passed the

  Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, the first of its kind in the U.S., which states that third-party reservation services cannot “advertise, promote or sell reservations” without a written agreement with a restaurant. Violators can be fined up to $1,000 per instance. The bill has drawn support from restaurants and from reservation sites such as Resy and OpenTable.

  Jonas Frey, founder of Appointment Trader—which buys and sells reservations secured by “bots, concierges, hustlers and other mercenaries,” as per its website—says the bill is “against everything the free market in the U.S. stands for.” He considers what Appointment Trader does no different from greasing the palm of a concierge or maître d’.

  Frey insists that sites such as Appointment Trader “did not create this problem.” He blames the restaurants themselves, and credit card companies such as American Express—which owns the reservation site Resy and is in the process of acquiring the reservation site Tock—for holding reservations for cardholders and shutting out diners who are not. This week, OpenTable also announced a partnership with Visa that will “unlock premier dining reservations for Visa premium cardholders,” a press release stated. Frey said of Appointment Trader, “The platform was created precisely because these systems make it hard or next-to-impossible to get desirable reservations.” Cita Marketplace, another site that buys and sells reservations, proudly proclaims in its tagline, “Our tables are so good, American Express tried to shut us down.” A spokesperson for American Express said, “Tables at some Resy restaurants are available to eligible American Express Card Members through the Global Access Dining benefit, but you do not need to be an American Express Card Member to book reservations on Resy.” American Express did not comment on attempting to shut Cita down.

  The Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act currently sits on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk along with 805 other bills awaiting signature. (Gov. Hochul’s office declined to comment on her position.) Meanwhile, restaurants around the country and reservation sites are instituting tactics to battle bots. “A lot of cities are watching to see what’s going to happen in New York and then see if it makes sense to try and get something passed in their respective states,” said OpenTable CEO Debby Soo.

  How Restaurants Spot the Bots

  Telltale signs of bot-made reservations include inactive phone numbers, invalid email addresses, emails with a string of numbers, unresponsiveness to follow-up emails or texts, and multiple bookings by the same account. Many restaurants say if they identify a reservation as a bot they will cancel it.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the time, if it seems like a bot reservation, it is,” said Alex Meyer, chef/owner of Boia De in Miami. “I think only once so far we got it wrong, and the person emailed and said, ‘Hey! Why was my reservation canceled?’ We apologized, reinstated it and they got a little bonus when they came in, for that inconvenience. If it’s a bot, we don’t hear back when it’s canceled.”

  How Restaurants Stop the Bots

  Some restaurants, like Raoul’s, are instituting a $50 fee per guest for no-shows. Others, like New York’s Semma, take it a step further with a nonrefundable $50 deposit per person, collected upon making the reservation, which is then applied as a credit toward the final bill.

  “I don’t want to charge a deposit, but the buying and selling of reservations has disoriented the relationship between the consumer and the brand,” said Semma proprietor Roni Mazumdar. “The people who are buying a reservation to jump on the bandwagon and show they got into a hot restaurant will move on to the next hot thing. They are not the people who are going to show up on a rainy Tuesday night.”

  Small restaurants such as Washington, D.C.’s minibar rely on ticketing systems to discourage thirdparty reservation sales. Such systems require a full, prepaid investment, like a sporting event or concert. “The fact that someone has ponied up $800 for two seats indicates they are a real person who is interested in dining at our restaurant,” said Alex Torres, minibar’s general manager. “If someone calls up to cancel, and we have a reasonable amount of time to fill their seat, we will always refund, though the verbiage on our cancellation policy says otherwise.”

  Aimee Olexy, proprietor of Talula’s Table in Kennett Square, Penn., avoids the bot issue by maintaining reservations the old-school way. “We release reservations one year out from the numerical date, and every morning at 7 a.m. we open our phone lines, and a human person is answering the phone and booking on a first-come, first-serve basis.” Olexy does turn to technology, to post on Instagram, when seats open last-minute. Still, takers must call to book those seats.

  Reservation sites are working on new initiatives to combat the problem. On the Resy website, a statement announces a “dedicated task force” committed to “deactivating rogue accounts, canceling suspicious reservations, blocking bot traffic,” along with “other technical measures.” OpenTable’s Soo said their initiatives include a process that flags fake credit card numbers and verifies diner profiles.

  Frey of Appointment Trader said it has systems in place to encourage sales and minimize no-shows. “We prioritize a concierge or someone actually working in a restaurant to get you a reservation,” he said. He added that Appointment Trader differentiates “good bots from bad bots.” He explained, “If you are a bot operator and you upload 20 reservations and you don’t sell at least five of those 20, your vendor account is blocked. If you don’t sell at least 10, you are in a warning state.”

  Appointment Trader also offers partnerships with restaurants, where the site and the restaurant would split a portion of the reservation sale. Restaurateurs aren’t necessarily convinced. “That doesn’t really solve the problem,” said Rob Mosher, partner at Monteverde in Chicago. “We are trying to charge a fair price for the services we are providing to people, and it adds an extra layer of financial transaction. We’d much rather our diners order a great bottle of wine instead of having to pay for a reservation.”

  Niki Nakayama, chef/owner of n/ naka in Los Angeles, said charging for reservations also inflates the customer’s expectations: “We have set a certain price point that is in line with what we feel we can provide. People should not have to pay a price on top of that.” Taking reservations out of the control of the restaurant presents an additional frustration level for the consumer, too. “We should be the ones who control it,” Nakayama said. “The bot market discourages people from wanting to visit, because they feel they can’t get a reservation. They become upset they can’t get in, and the restaurants get blamed for it.”

  How Diners Can Beat the Bots

  As restaurants, reservation sites and reservation-sale marketplaces battle it out, diners remain caught in the middle. But restaurateurs say there are still ways that diners can grab hard-to-get reservations without resorting to buying them.

  Members-only app Dorsia, for example, requires a minimum spend from the consumer at the restaurant rather than charging a fee for a reservation. “Dorsia is good for restaurants, as it transfers that extra money diners are willing to spend from the third-party sellers sitting on their couch to the restaurants doing the actual work,” said Meyer of Boia De. “This also means more tips for employees and more revenue for higher wages. At the end of the day, though, we want guests to join us for dinner without having to buy their way in, or be a member of an exclusive club.”

  Meyer is a firm believer in the “human factor,” where “diners can have an advantage over a bot in that they are a person with a personality. If people are human, nice, generous and gracious, we will do our best to give them what they ask for if they call, email or just show up.”

  Mosher of Chicago’s Monteverde agrees. “Don’t forget that most restaurants hold back a portion of reservations that are not made available online,” he said. “We will offer those to our guests who come into the restaurant, stop at the host stand and ask for a reservation. We like to say yes to that person because they have made the extra effort to come in.” He further emphasized the power of building relationships in-person: “Ask for the maître’d’s card. Get to know the staff and the management.” He also suggested that diners make a reservation in person on their way out, after they have already dined. “If someone has had a good experience and they say, ‘I’d like to come back in two weeks,’ we want to be able to say yes to that person. It really goes back to getting away from the digital aspect and going back to the old-school way of doing things.”

  OpenTable’s Soo recommended following the restaurant’s lead: “If it is using a certain type of system for the reservation, secure the reservation in that way and don’t contribute to the market. If diners stop the activity, it will stop giving these third parties oxygen to keep going.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/21
• 
  

  Infoman

  Big Tech Outage Disrupts Banks, AirlinesBy Sam Schechner, Gareth Vipers and Alyssa Lukpat

  The Wall Street Journal 20 Jul 2024

  A massive tech outage swept the globe on Friday, knocking out operations for banks, companies and emergency services and forcing airlines to ground flights, exposing the fragility and interdependence of global digital technology.

  A single update from CrowdStrike, a major provider of cybersecurity software, caused outages for millions of users of Microsoft Windows devices worldwide. Major airlines including Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines halted departures overnight.

  Windows computers and tablets crashed in countries from the U.S. to China and Australia, with reports of forced device restarts spreading across social media. Many affected machines were unable to restart, instead showing a blue error screen sometimes called the “blue screen of death.”

  The outage touched almost every industry. Multiple financial institutions, government entities and corporations reported tech issues. Some hospitals and school districts said computers were down, and courthouses around the U.S. either closed or delayed trial proceedings. Still, financial markets were largely operat-

  ing as normal, and many companies said systems were starting to be restored.

  That one update from a single provider could plunge so many companies into a digital dark age serves as a fresh warning of the world’s technological dependence. While past outages, like a Google failure in 2020, have also locked millions out of tools they need, companies’ and individuals’ increasing reliance on automated tools powered by artificial intelligence makes each new disruption feel more ominous.

  Friday’s outage also highlights the tension in relying heavily on centralized tools like those offered by CrowdStrike. On one hand, the fact that so many companies use the tools help make them more effective at detecting and blocking the latest attacks.

  But it also shows how one bug in one update can just as easily grind parts of the global economy to a halt.

  Tech issues

  CrowdStrike Chief Executive George Kurtz said in a post on X that the issue had been identified and a fix had been deployed, adding that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

  Kurtz told NBC’s “Today” show that the company is always pushing out updates to stay ahead of adversaries and its recent update had a bug in it. “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this,” he said. “It could be some time for some systems that just won’t automatically recover.”

  One of CrowdStrike’s main services is called Falcon, which monitors a company’s machines for hacking attempts, viruses and other threats. The Austin-based company has about 29,000 customers and went public in 2019.

  CrowdStrike told customers in a status update seen by The Wall Street Journal that the problem was with a software change it had pushed via Falcon out to clients’ computers. The company said its engineers had undone the change but clients would need to use a workaround to download a fix to affected computers.

  Some affected users may be back up and running soon, but for others it could take weeks depending on the system in use, said Simo Kohonen, founder of Finland-based network security company Defused. “The fix CrowdStrike has given is quite manual and may be difficult, in some cases, to deploy at large scale,” he said.

  Microsoft said the CrowdStrike error was separate from a problem it faced overnight with cloud services including Microsoft 365 apps.

  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Friday on X the company was working closely with CrowdStrike to provide customers with technical guidance to help bring their systems back online.

  CrowdStrike shares closed 11% lower Friday. Microsoft’s were down slightly.

  Broad impact

  In the U.S., many 911 and nonemergency call centers were disrupted. The New York City mass transit system was fully operational, but countdown clocks and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s app were disrupted, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

  Amazon.com’s corporate email system also appeared to be experiencing issues Friday morning, according to employees. The company uses Microsoft Outlook for email, and many of the company’s employees also use the communications platform Slack. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

  Starbucks had issues early Friday with app ordering and its payment and point-of-sale systems, forcing customers to order directly in stores.

  The financial sector was largely running as usual, but some companies reported issues. Visa said it was aware of reports of people unable to make payments. Banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and TD Bank experienced varying disruptions related to the outage.

  Seaports from Los Angeles to Gdansk, Poland, reported delays in handling cargo and other operations, according to risk-management firm Everstream Analytics, but most expected to resume normal business on Friday.

  Freight railroad Union Pacific said the outage had varying levels of impacts across its network, while BNSF said it hadn’t seen signs that its systems were affected.

  United Parcel Service said its package business was “operating and delivering in all areas,” but warned of possible delays in pickup and delivery.

  Billionaire Elon Musk, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX among other companies, said the outage had given the auto supply chain a “seizure,” disrupting operations for parts makers and logistics partners using CrowdStrike software. In a series of posts, he said: “we just deleted Crowdstrike from all our systems” and called the episode the “biggest IT fail ever.”

  President Biden is receiving updates on the outage and his team has offered U.S. government support to CrowdStrike, a White House official said. Government agencies have been convened to assess the situation around the country, the official said.

  Travel snarls

  More than 41,000 flights around the world were delayed and more than 4,600 were canceled by Friday evening, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

  United and American had also asked the Federal Aviation Administration overnight to alert their pilots in the air that they were experiencing communication problems, according to public notices.

  Several U.S. airlines, including American, Delta and United, said they were starting to resume some flights Friday morning. Delta had initially paused flights because the outage had affected backend systems that ensure planes are safely dispatched, a person familiar with the matter said.

  In the Columbus, Ohio, airport, agents for Spirit Airlines handed out paper boarding passes in a line that snaked across a concourse.

  At Boston’s Logan airport, Tom Fennell, a 47-year-old teacher from Cameron Park, Calif., remained near an outlet with his phone to wait out the delay, surrounded by a group of fellow stranded travelers.

  The outage also snarled hotels, making it harder to bill guests, check out of rooms or create new reservations. At Indus Hotels, which operates roughly a dozen Hilton and Marriott hotels in Ohio and Pennsylvania, many properties had only a single computer working on Friday morning.

  “On-property managers are definitely pulling their hair out,” said Alan L. Assaf, chief operating officer at Indus. “I’d say they’re limping along.”

  The outage didn’t affect everyone equally. While some PC users were staring at blue screens and troubleshooting, others were able to go about their workdays as normal.

  Dr. Agus De Ganzó, a molecular biologist, thought he wouldn’t be able to work on his PC when he arrived at his job Friday.

  “Mine was the only one working,” he said. “I hate Microsoft.”

  De Ganzó, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and is in his mid 30s, said the PC he reluctantly uses was the oldest one in the lab and was the only one that didn’t go down because of the outage.

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/21
• 
  

  Infoman

  A push to develop generative A.I. and avoid the lawsuits

  NICO GRANT AND CADE METZ

  The New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024 Content creators seek licensing to be paid for images that train models

  Companies like Google and OpenAI built their artificial intelligence chatbots and image generators by gobbling content from the web, prompting legal fights over copyright claims.

  Now, some of those copyright holders are trying to get in on the A.I. boom. The major stock photo suppliers Getty Images and Shutterstock, among others, are building A.I. image generators with their own data, bypassing the legal worries that have shadowed the industry.

  While the largest tech companies have been locked in a dizzying A.I. race, visual media marketplaces, content creators and artists are pushing for licensing so that they can be paid for work that helps train A.I. models and influences the technology they worry could one day displace them. It’s part of a larger effort to transform how A.I. models are developed, one that would train them with licensed data rather than with content that is scraped without permission.

  While many image generators are often used by consumers for amusement, like creating the viral image of the pope in a white puffer jacket, the tech industry has coalesced around the idea that more advertising agencies and other companies would use these tools for marketing if there were no legal uncertainty surrounding them.

  That’s the target market for Getty. Its partner, Picsart, which is building an A.I. image model with stock photos from Getty’s repository, is trying to appeal to small- and medium-size businesses. The company is mostly known for a photoediting app used by more than 100 million people, most of them Gen Z-ers.

  Picsart wanted to use licensed data to build the model because, for the company and customers, lawsuits are “a drag to the business; it’s a distraction,” Craig Foster, its chief financial officer, said. “I don’t want any part of that.”

  After ChatGPT, the chatbot from OpenAI, and Stable Diffusion, a popular image generator from the British startup Stability AI, wowed consumers in 2022, Google, Meta and other companies rushed to release similar A.I. capabilities. Lawsuits soon followed.

  Publishers, authors and artists said they found signs that their works had been scraped to train the A.I. models. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December for using copyrighted news articles without permission to train A.I. chatbots. OpenAI and Microsoft said they used the articles under “fair use.”

  There’s also been legal wrangling over models that convert text into images. Cartoonists and a photographer sued Google in April, saying the company trained Imagen, its image generator, with their copyrighted works. Google has said that “American law has long supported using public information in new and beneficial ways.”

  “With each different version of technology that comes out, copyright law is put to the test,” said Alan Fisch, an intellectual property lawyer at Fisch Sigler. Without clear legal rules in place, licensing data is “one way to reduce risk,” he added.

  In early 2023, Getty Images, the world’s largest privately owned archive, noticed that its famous watermark was being recreated in some A.I.-generated images from Stable Diffusion. It sued the tool’s maker, Stability AI, in February 2023, saying it had copied more than 12 million images from Getty’s collection. Stability said it had not infringed on Getty’s intellectual property rights.

  Getty worked with the chipmaker Nvidia to build its own image generator, calling it “a worry-free model built for business.” Through Getty’s website or another interface, customers can type in a prompt for the image they want to see and specify its quality and style. Then, they can select the shape and color of the image, and the generator will present multiple options.

  Getty, along with 20 other stock image companies, is providing images for Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, to build an A.I. model. Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its partners.

  Yair Adato, the chief executive of Bria, said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators.

  Without “value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring,” he said.

  Getty has said it will pay photographers when it uses their images to train a model. It will also give photographers a portion of the subscription revenue it receives from clients. The company told Wired it paid about 30 cents on the dollar for every dollar it made.

  The rising quality of models that generate images and videos has many artists concerned for the fate of their industries. And it is not always clear if A.I. companies have used their content to train the underlying models. The Times has reported that Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, was trained partly on YouTube videos, but the company has not been transparent about data sources.

  That lack of transparency concerns filmmakers like Joe Talbot, who directed the award-winning film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” He said artists needed to be consulted about technology being built on the backs of their work.

  “I worry,” he said, “about my fellow film brethren being able to etch out a decent existence.”

  Shutterstock, which has a massive library of images and video clips, started a contributor fund in 2022 to compensate artists when their work was licensed for A.I. The amount a contributor is paid depends on how much an A.I. provider pays Shutterstock. Their royalties are a proportion from each deal, and the amount rises if the client uses more of their images. The company declined to specify exact percentages, the average value of a photo or typical payouts.

  Outside of A.I., regular photos on Shutterstock often sell for $14.50 each, and photographers receive 15 to 40 percent of the total, depending on how many they license in a year.

  Shutterstock has taken a different route to A.I. than its rival Getty has, selling images to major A.I. providers like OpenAI since 2021 and receiving $104 million in licensing revenue last year. But it says licensing habits are changing.

  “We are well aware that the days of needing huge volumes of data to train models are over,” said Aimee Egan, the chief enterprise officer of Shutterstock.

  Later this year, the company will roll out two A.I. models: one with the software maker Databricks for images and another with Nvidia for 3-D images.

  Companies like Shutterstock and Adobe are now paying photographers to take pictures for A.I. training, but the earning potential can be modest and inconsistent. Adobe has offered photographers less than $100 to shoot as many as 1,000 photos for A.I., Bloomberg News reported. And the rush to develop polished generated images could erode long-term job prospects in photography.

  That has left room for other companies trying to help artists be paid when their work is used for A.I. The start-up OpenLicense built a marketplace where A.I. businesses can find data and artists can be compensated and track which models are using their work. Payments scale with how often a photo is used. If a photo is referenced a million times to generate images, the artist can expect as much as $12,000 in royalties, said Joshua Soto, the co-founder and president of OpenLicense.

  The company has started working with artists on Imageshack, an imagehosting site it has teamed up with.

  Mr. Soto said the company was “trying to bridge the benefits” of A.I. between developers and artists.

  That relationship was recently put under more strain when Adobe, the software giant behind Photoshop, updated its terms of service with vague language in June. Some customers believed the words to mean that Adobe would scrape their work to keep building its generative A.I. system, Firefly.

  The company denied the claim several times. But the episode highlighted artists’ fears over how A.I. could disrupt their livelihoods — a worry that has led some to oppose the technology. But Mr. Soto, a onetime graphic designer, said that engaging could make the best of a challenging situation.

  “Your content is going to get used either way,” he said. “You might as well be in a position where you are part of that process and explicitly saying which content you want used.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/20
• 
  

  Infoman

  THIS ANT SPECIES ACTS LIKE SURGEONS WHEN TREATING HURT LIMBS

  New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024

  The life of a Florida carpenter ant can be brutal. These half-inch ants are territorial and have violent bouts with ants from rival colonies in the Southeast.

  Combat can leave the ants with leg injuries. But as scientists recently discovered, these ants have evolved an effective wound treatment: amputation.

  In the journal Current Biology, researchers report that the ants bite off the injured limbs of their nest mates to prevent infection. Although other ant species are known to tend to the wounds of their injured, typically by licking them clean, this is the first time that an ant species has been known to use amputation to treat an injury.

  The ants performed amputations on only certain leg injuries, suggesting that they are methodical in their surgical practices. Aside from humans, no other animal is known to conduct such amputations.

  In early 2020, Dany Buffat, a graduate student at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, was observing a colony of Florida carpenter ants in his lab when he noticed one ant was biting off another ant’s leg. His adviser, Erik Frank, now at the University of Würzburg, didn’t believe him at first, but was then shown the video evidence.

  They began tracking the amputees’ survival rate. Unexpectedly, the ants with amputated limbs survived 90 percent of the time — and the amputations appeared to be consensual. “The ant presents its injured leg and calmly sits there while another ant gnaws it off,” Dr. Frank said. “As soon as the leg drops off, the ant presents the newly amputated wound and the other ant finishes the job by cleaning it.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/20
• 
  

  Infoman

  ‘LIFE AND TRUST’ IMMERSES VIEWERS FROM A SETTING HIGH IN THE SKY

  New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024

  What’s the going rate for a soul these days? A little more than $200 on weekends, less on weekdays, handling fees included.

  That’s the ticket price for “Life and Trust,” the new show from Emursive, the producers of “Sleep No More,” and arguably an even more ambitious undertaking. A version of the Faust legend (well, several braided versions of the Faust legend), “Life and Trust,” which opens on Aug. 1, occupies 100,000 square feet, or about 9,300 square meters, over six floors of a financial district skyscraper in New York that was once the home of the City Bank-Farmers Trust Company.

  In a brief introduction, set on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, a financier makes a deal with the Devil: damnation in exchange for the chance to relive his youth. The show ushers audiences back to 1894, plunging them into a Gilded Age delirium.

  “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get a canvas of this size,” said Teddy Bergman, the director of “Life and Trust.” “It just keeps going.”

  Making this deal with the Devil took space. And time. And quite a lot of money. How much money? The producers wouldn’t say, though Jonathan Hochwald, a producer at Emursive, said the final amount was comfortably in the millions.

  In 2011, Emursive imported “Sleep No More,” a Hitchcockian riff on “Macbeth” created by the celebrated British company Punchdrunk. Staged in a series of former nightclub spaces in the Chelsea neighborhood that the producers rechristened the McKittrick Hotel, “Sleep No More,” which is set to close in September, was an instant word-of-mouth success. A few years into its run, Emursive began to scout other spaces for immersive events. Hochwald estimates that he considered about a dozen.

  What Emursive calls the Conwell Tower takes up a full block near Wall Street. The building was intended to be the world’s tallest when its plans were submitted in 1929, but they were scaled back before it opened in 1931. The exterior has been designated a landmark. While most of the upper floors have been converted to rental apartments, a portion of the ground floor and the floors underneath, once the headquarters of the bank, have been more or less unoccupied since the late 1970s. (Occasionally they have been rented for film shoots.)

  Hochwald said these floors had essentially been “hidden in plain sight.” “It was quite a marvel,” he added. That marvel demanded an original script. “Having found the building, it was like: What story does this building want to tell?” Hochwald said.

  Emursive secured the lease in 2019 and brought on Jon Ronson, a nonfiction writer (“The Psychopath Test,” “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”), to work up a script. The script used the template of the bank — with its vocabulary of bonds, trusts and life savings — for a rendering of the Faust myth. Here, the Goethe and Marlowe versions are knit with similar stories such as “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Red Shoes.”

  With a script drafted, Emursive reached out to Bergman (“KPOP”), a longtime artistic director of Woodshed Collective, a New York-based immersive theater company. Woodshed had set at least one show, “Empire Travel Agency,” in the financial district, so Bergman knew the neighborhood well. (Hochwald said that while Emursive maintains a relationship with Punchdrunk, which also has a Faust in its repertory, the producers wanted a local team for this piece.)

  When he visited the site, Bergman was immediately struck by its potential, even though the space — concrete, columns — was almost entirely raw. “The ghosts of its functional history as a bank building and the vaults and the thickness of the walls all gave off energy,” he said.

  Briskly, Bergman and the producers assembled a team, including the experience director and scenic designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn, another Woodshed veteran, and the sibling co-directors and choreographers Jeff and Rick Kuperman, recent Tony nominees for “The Outsiders.”

  Echoing “Sleep No More,” audience members are masked (the Mephistophelian “Life and Trust” masks are black, not white) and free to wander the space — following characters at will, pausing to explore an environment — before uniting for a finale. And though Ronson’s script was initially text heavy, nearly all of that text was removed, in favor of a movement-based work with constant underscoring, lending the show a surreal, dreamy feel.

  “One of the things that Emursive and ‘Sleep No More’ have done so successfully is conjure the feeling of a dream,” Bergman said. “We want it to use that in the service of creating a different show in its subject matter and also in its Americanness.”

  Construction began in late 2019, with the removal of decades of bank detritus, and stopped in the spring because of pandemic lockdowns. Members of the creative team — including Bergman, the Kupermans, Evansohn, the co-designer Grace Laubacher and the show’s composers, Taylor Bense and Owen Belton — spent much of that lockdown online, manipulating a three-dimensional model of the space. For more than a year, without pressure of construction or deadlines, they could play and imagine how the story might flow through it. The pandemic, therefore, was paradoxically a gift, if an expensive one, since the lease had to be maintained, and ticket sales from Emursive’s other projects were halted.

  Gradually, the creative team created a template involving 30 characters in 250 overlapping scenes, which would loop twice during the evening, with every entrance and exit dictated by preset sound cues. While those sound cues are locked, there is typically a sonic buffer at the start and end of each scene to allow the performers to get to their places, even if they have to fight through crowds. In total, Bense and Belton composed more than 1,000 minutes of music.

  “You end up with a spreadsheet like an Advent calendar. Everything pops out and is a scene,” Bergman said.

  The space had its limitations. Left unused for so long, the electricity and the heating, ventilation and air conditioning required updates, which necessitated an extensive permitting process. “It’s like climbing a Himalayan peak, to get through all of the city bureaucracy,” Hochwald said. The building’s neighbors also had to be convinced that the show wouldn’t create too much additional noise and traffic. And two new elevators had to be installed to make the space compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

  The vast floors had low ceilings, which made sightlines tricky. And the concrete surfaces were hard on the actors’ joints. “When we started, we were dancing on concrete with little nails popping out or really rough surfaces that felt hostile,” said Marla Phelan, a performer. Running up and down the many stairs was also challenging.

  “It’s violent. It’s a marathon,” added Mia DiLena, Phelan’s scene partner.

  But there were also opportunities. Padding was installed, a spiral staircase built. “Now we have squishy grass or gravel,” Phelan said. “I can actually be a person that’s not in danger of their surroundings.”

  Certain structural elements couldn’t be altered — “because they’re literally supporting a skyscraper,” Evansohn said — but nearly everything else was theirs for the reimagining. And elements such as the walls, the floors and the vault doors could be incorporated into the experience, even informing the choreography.

  “You need to create choreography that can’t exist in any other space or any other piece of scenery,” Rick Kuperman said. “That’s what really makes it come alive to us.”

  Construction began again in 2021 and ended only recently. At times there were as many as 200 workers building out the warrens of rooms. These workers also created an elaborate entrance point, the Conwell Coffee Hall, a dramatic space adorned with a custom-painted mural. It opened in late winter. During the day, it’s a bustling cafe. At night, it becomes a theater lobby and bar. In the coffee hall and in the rooms beneath, Evansohn chose real materials — brick, stone, wood — which is unusual for a theater piece.

  “The design is tactile,” Evansohn said. And it is thick with illusions and secrets (perhaps you will find the poodle room). “Life and Trust” is built to reward curiosity, but there are, Bergman said, safety protocols to prevent harassment of the performers, a problem that plagued “Sleep No More.”

  The performers began rehearsing on site in November. At the end of June, audiences joined them for a handful of friends and family evenings and then for previews. With bodies in the room, the crew began adjusting the hundreds of sound cues and the thousands of light cues.

  “We have our plan,” Jeff Kuperman said. “And then you get in the space and reality hits and it all shifts.” Bergman described these adjustments as a mix of precision and magic. “It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of refinement. It’s alchemy,” he said.

  When I visited the coffee hall, on two afternoons in late June, it was full of tourists and locals enjoying sandwiches and cold brew. They didn’t seem to notice that all the clocks were set to 10:29 — the month and year of the stock market crash — or the Easter eggs hidden in the menu and in the mural. Very few would realize what lies beneath.

  “It’s exciting,” Hochwald said, gazing around the room. “They have no idea that there’s an entire world underneath them.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/20
• 
  

  Infoman

  SHARK THRILLER THAT 50 YEARS AGO CAPTURED READERS’ ANGSTThe New York Times (International Edition) 20 Jul 2024

  In 1973, the first chapter of an unpublished novel was photocopied and passed around the Manhattan offices of Doubleday & Co. with a note. “Read this,” it dared, “without reading the rest of the book.”

  Those who accepted the challenge were treated to a swift-moving tale of terror, one that begins with a young woman taking a postcoital dip in the waters off Long Island. As her lover dozes on the beach, she’s ravaged by a great white shark.

  “The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water,” the passage read. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.”

  Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, had circulated the bloody, soapy excerpt to drum up excitement for his latest project: a thriller about a massive fish stalking a small island town, written by a young author named Peter Benchley.

  Congdon’s gambit worked. No one who read the opening could put the novel down. All it needed was a grabby title. Benchley had spent months kicking around potential names (“Dark White”? “The Edge of Gloom”?). Finally, just hours before deadline, he found it.

  “Jaws,” he wrote on the manuscript’s cover page.

  When it was released in early 1974, Benchley’s novel kicked off a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry — and in Hollywood. “Jaws” spent months on the best-seller lists, turned Benchley from an unknown to a literary celebrity and, of course, became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting 1975 film adaptation.

  While most readers were drawn to the book’s shark-centric story line, “Jaws” rode multiple mid-1970s cultural waves: It was also a novel about a frayed marriage, a financially iffy town and a corrupt local government — released at a time of skyrocketing divorce rates, mass unemployment and a presidential scandal.

  At a time of change and uncertainty, “Jaws” functioned as an allegory for whatever scared or angered the reader. Even Fidel Castro was a fan, describing “Jaws” as a “splendid Marxist lesson,” one that proved that “capitalism will risk even human life in order to keep the markets going.”

  The success of “Jaws” — at bookstores and in theaters — had unforeseen consequences for Benchley. Throughout the late ’70s, he watched in frustration as sharks were branded public enemies. Benchley, a longtime sea lover, spent decades transforming himself into an amicable shark defender, reminding readers that the man-eater in “Jaws” was a work of fiction.

  “Many people took ‘Jaws’ as a license to go out and kill sharks,” said Wendy Benchley, who was married to Benchley from 1964 until his death in 2006. “We tried to use ‘Jaws’ in every way we could to sound the alarm about sharks, and about how important they were to the ecosystem.”

  It was an unlikely legacy for Benchley’s gruesome, toothsome book — one the author never expected to be a hit in the first place. He didn’t think readers would seize on a beast-versus-beach tale from a first-time novelist. And the idea of “Jaws,” with its monster shark, making it to the big screen seemed unworkable to him.

  “Everything about it was an accident,” Benchley would say decades after the summer of “Jaws” — the book, the phenomenon, the whole thing.

  Benchley’s infatuation with sharks — and with writing — began during his childhood summers on Nantucket. That’s where he’d go fishing with his father, the novelist Nathaniel Benchley, and notice the many fins cresting the water. It’s also where he’d spend hours by himself, practicing his craft.

  “His father was very smart with him,” Wendy Benchley recalled in a recent video interview. “He said, ‘If you want to write novels, you just absolutely cannot have writer’s block. So I’ll tell you what: I’ll pay you what you would make mowing lawns for the summer if you get up every morning at 7 and go out and produce something.’”

  The younger Benchley was just starting his writing career when, in 1964, he spotted a newspaper story about a fisherman named Frank Mundus, who’d used harpoons to capture a giant great white shark off Montauk Point. There’d been a recent uptick in great whites in the area, but none as large as Mundus’s catch, which was more than 17 feet, or 5 meters, long and estimated to weigh nearly 4,500 pounds, or over 2,000 kilograms.

  Benchley clipped the article from The New York Daily News and put it in his wallet, where it would stay for the next several years. During that time, Benchley worked as an editor at Newsweek, and later as a speechwriter for Lyndon B. Johnson. When his White House gig ended in 1969, Benchley began freelancing for numerous publications, writing

  book reviews, film reviews and occasional travel pieces.

  But Benchley hadn’t forgotten about that oversize shark on Long Island. He’d occasionally pull the yellowing story from his wallet and show it to others. “I would brandish it at the first hint of disbelief that such an animal could exist, let alone that it might attack boats and eat people,” he later wrote in his memoir “Shark Trouble.”

  In the early 1970s, interest in great whites was surging, thanks to a series of high-profile undersea dives captured in the documentary “Blue Water, White Death” and the book “Blue Meridian,” both released in 1971. That same year, Benchley was invited to lunch with Congdon in Manhattan. He pitched the editor a couple of potential book ideas — including one about a great white shark that plagues a seaside community.

  Congdon, knowing sharks were a hot commodity — and seeing that Benchley was an amateur expert on the subject — agreed to pay him $1,000 for the first four chapters. Benchley, then living with his wife and two young kids in Pennington, N.J., rented a room in a furnace factory and got to work.

  Benchley’s first stab at “Jaws” was rejected by Congdon, who thought the book was trying too hard to be humorous. But by the second draft, parts of the novel were coming together — especially that first chapter, in which the shark glides through the night water, “propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”

  Kate Medina was an editorial assistant at Doubleday in the early ’70s when she was recruited to help guide Benchley through the revision process. “I don’t think the beginning of ‘Jaws’ was ever changed,” she recalled.

  “Peter had from the start a strong and intuitive sense of pace and of storytelling, and a deep love for writing and for the sea,” Medina, now an executive editorial director at Random House, wrote in an email. “Every time that fish swam into the book, it was great.”

  With Medina’s assistance, Benchley developed the novel’s many non-aquatic characters, including its three unlikely heroes: Martin Brody, the harried police chief of the fictitious town of Amity, Long Island; Matt Hooper, an oceanographer brought in to track the shark; and Quint, a rugged fisherman tasked with killing the fish.

  Those who are only familiar with the big-screen version of “Jaws” may be surprised by the many juicy subplots in Benchley’s novel. Amity itself is on the brink of ruin, having barely survived the early ’70s recession. Also in decline: Brody’s marriage to his class-conscious wife, Ellen, who has a sexually charged encounter with Hooper at a surf-and turf spot. Then there’s the town’s mayor, Larry Vaughn, who’s so deeply indebted to the mob, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep the beaches open — even if it means people die.

  For all the intrigue, though, the book’s main attraction is the shark lurking in the background, its actions and desires described with clinical rigor.

  “Part of the book was from the shark’s point of view,” said Daniel Kraus, the author of last year’s acclaimed ocean-set thriller “Whale fall,” who first encountered “Jaws” as a young reader. “The book is from the perspective of a monster, and it’s not even behaving monstrously — it’s a creature just being itself.”

  As the novel’s publication date neared, Doubleday’s belief in “Jaws” was so strong that the company considered a series of promotional stunts, such as hiring skywriters to spell out “READ JAWS” over Jones Beach, or putting up signs in Long Island Rail Road cars that read, “A great white shark is as long as this car.”

  Yet “Jaws” didn’t end up needing a highflying marketing campaign. The novel became a must-read long before it arrived on shelves, thanks to a combination of book business might, Hollywood hype and a killer cover.

  In April 1973, not long after turning in his manuscript for “Jaws,” Benchley was sitting in his kitchen, eating breakfast, when he got a phone call. It was Congdon, telling him that Doubleday had received a bid from another publishing house, Bantam, for the paperback rights to “Jaws.” The offer? More than half a million dollars.

  It was life-changing money. On hearing the news, Wendy Benchley began to cry. “I thought it was just too much,” she said, “that it was going to be bad for our little family.”

  The hefty payday made it clear that “Jaws” was certain to be a smash. The demand for mass market paperbacks had recently exploded, with publishers doing brisk business at drugstores and supermarkets. A paperback deal in the high six figures — as had been the case with Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and Piers Paul Read’s “Alive”— was a solid predictor of future sales.

  Then came word that Universal Pictures was planning a film adaptation of Benchley’s book, after winning the rights in a bidding war in the summer of 1973. The film would be directed by Spielberg, then an amateur auteur whose second film, “The Sugarland Express,” had yet to be released.

  Finally, in February 1974, “Jaws” hit bookstores. The cover image was striking: a minimalist illustration of an openmouthed shark — which one Doubleday employee compared to “a penis with teeth” — racing toward a hapless female swimmer.

  As the summer drew near, “Jaws” became an essential beach read — albeit one best experienced far from the shoreline. And its popularity ballooned even more after the film adaptation, which was co-written by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb and featured a famously temperamental mechanical shark, came out in 1975.

  As Wendy Benchley had feared, the success of “Jaws” also proved disruptive. Over the years, Benchley received death threats from readers who resented how much “Jaws” had scared them. And because Benchley was easily recognizable — he’d made the promotional rounds on TV and even had a cameo in the film — it felt as if the author couldn’t make a supermarket run without being accosted.

  Even worse: After “Jaws,” Benchley noticed a marked increase in shark hunting and tournaments. He decried the “spasm of macho lunacy” his book had inadvertently inspired — and bemoaned the fact that, thanks to “Jaws,” millions saw sharks as ruthless killers that targeted humans.

  Benchley began raising awareness of sharks’ importance to the ecosystem, even visiting Hong Kong to speak out against the mass production of shark fin soup. He also embarked on several dives with his wife — including expeditions in which they encountered sharks up close.

  “We grew in our appreciation of the ocean,” Wendy Benchley said. “We learned with everybody else.”

  Not long before his death in 2006, Benchley looked back on “Jaws” with what sounded like a tinge of regret. “Knowing what I know now,” he said, “I could never write that book today. Sharks don’t target human beings, and they certainly don’t hold grudges.”

  But Wendy Benchley said the author remained proud of “Jaws,” and of its impact — not just on readers and moviegoers, but also ultimately on the awareness of sharks. “He was at peace with it,” she said.

  And over the years, whenever someone brought up how much “Jaws” had scared them, he had a quick and punchy response: “It was just a novel.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/20
• 
  

  Infoman

  Our side hustles bring in $125,000 a year or more: ‘Nearly everybody’ can make money this way

  Published Wed, Jul 10 20249:15 AM EDTUpdated An Hour

  Jamie and Sarah McCauley started sharing their side hustle adventures on YouTube with a simple goal: to work fewer hours and spend more time with their family. Jamie and Sarah McCauley started sharing their side hustle adventures on YouTube, hoping to work fewer hours and spend more time with family.Jamie and Sarah McCauley Sarah and Jamie McCauley are landlords, YouTubers, Walmart pallet flippers, eBay resellers and Amazon product reviewers — and those are just their active streams of income.

  The McCauleys make their money by researching what makes side hustles profitable, testing them and teaching others how to do the same on YouTube. The Grand Rapids, Michigan-based couple earned nearly $140,000 from eight streams of income last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

  They’re particularly good at two types of gigs, they say: anything involving real estate and their YouTube channel itself, where they share their side hustle exploits with at least 146,000 subscribers.

  “If you’re looking to just make some extra money on the side, maybe pay off a credit card debt or pay for a vacation, I think that is doable for nearly everybody,” says Jamie.

  DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

  The McCauleys are part of a side hustle revolution, a growing number of Americans who supplement income with multiple jobs. More U.S adults — about 39%, according to Bankrate — have side hustles today than ever before, whether out of necessity, precaution or a desire to increase their earning power.

  Ease of starting is at an all-time high: Platforms like Amazon, Airbnb and Fiverr offer instant access to paying customers. But with competition also rising, it’s hard to build a side hustle that regularly brings in revenue.

  Make It spoke with a selection of Americans with successful side hustles to learn how they built their businesses, and used them to fund a wide variety of financial goals. Every respondent highlighted four common traits that helped drive their success:

  They tailor their product to their audience

  No matter what you sell, you need people willing to buy it. Jenny Woo says her side hustle is successful for a simple reason: She researches her audiences intensely, and tailors her products specifically to them.

  Woo is an adjunct lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, a freelance business consultant and the teacher of an online course about emotional intelligence. Her one-woman side hustle, called Mind Brain Emotion, sells 12 different emotional intelligence-themed card games.

  It brought in $1.71 million on Amazon last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It.

  Dr. Jenny Woo, founder and CEO of Mind Brain Emotion. Dr. Jenny Woo, founder and CEO of Mind Brain Emotion.Photo: Jenny Woo Woo’s first deck of cards, “52 Essential Conversations,” was tailored toward parents who — like her — wanted to connect with their kids and build their emotional intelligence skills. She joined parenting Facebook groups and observed users’ posting, commenting and liking habits, she says.

  After selling $10,000 worth of the game in a 2018 Kickstarter campaign, Woo kept researching. She conducted a survey of her consumers, and learned that “overwhelmed” teachers looking to support children’s social and emotional development made up a significant portion of her audience, she says.

  Her second deck, “52 Essential Relationship Skills,” was built for those teachers. It didn’t sell as well as her first deck, but it taught Woo that she could broaden, and combine, her audiences.

  Woo applied that lesson to her third game, “52 Coping Skills.” She started with her own experiences working with college students during the Covid-19 pandemic and combined it with her continued research on teachers and parents, she says.

  It’s now Mind Brain Emotion’s top-selling game, says Woo.

  They find a platform suited for their product

  Woo sells on Amazon, which has a broad reach, to collectively rope in Mind Brain Emotion’s hyper-specific audiences. Tim Riegel’s products have a more singular customer base, so he sells on Etsy, a marketplace known largely for homemade and handmade goods.

  Riegel, a full-time general manager at a sheltered workshop, makes firepits from recycled tank ends in Lamar, Missouri, and sells them under the name Mozark Fire Pits. His average product weighs 225 pounds, and sells for $950.

  Mozark Fire Pits brought in approximately $202,000 on Etsy last year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Riegel maintains a 40% profit margin, he says.

  Riegel chose Etsy over platforms like Amazon, Wayfair and Overstock because it felt more user-friendly, and a better fit for his personalized products, he says. He also sells on Facebook Marketplace, which costs him more in advertising — but less in shipping costs for customers within a 200-mile radius, he adds.

  Tim Riegel turns propane gas tank ends into fire pits and sells them on Etsy. Tim Riegel turns propane gas tank ends into fire pits and sells them on Etsy.Tim Riegel That kind of platform analysis is valuable, no matter what kind of side hustle you run.

  If you sell a service, instead of a good, you might consider platforms like Fiverr and Upwork — popular among photo editors, marketing writers and voiceover artists — or Taskrabbit, known for labor-intensive side hustles like cleaning or repair work.

  Or, opt out of those platforms entirely. If your gig is something that many other people also do, try finding marketplaces with more narrow niches like Contently, Skyword or ServiceScape, recommends side hustle expert Kathy Kristof.

  “One of the problems I see with a lot of freelancers is that they go to the best-known online platforms ... and those platforms are so saturated with people who have been there for, often, decades,” says Kristof, whose blog SideHusl has reviewed more than 500 different side gigs.

  They stand out on saturated platforms

  No matter your platform, you’ll need to stand out. A good listing can help: clear and concise, written for your intended audience, free of typos, with high-quality graphics and some search engine optimization (SEO).

  Becky Powell, a kindergarten teacher based in Beaverton, Oregon, has a side hustle selling worksheets for other educators on an online platform called Teachers Pay Teachers. Many of her worksheets focus on her personal specialty, teaching children sight-reading skills.

  Her side hustle didn’t take off until she embraced SEO. When she uploaded her first worksheets, she titled them, “Creating sight words with pattern blocks.” Sales slowly trickled in.

  Her husband Jerome, who has a business background, suggested a simpler title, like “Hands-on sight words.” The sight-reading worksheets quickly became her bestselling products, Powell says.

  Kindergarten teacher Becky Powell's side hustle — making worksheets for other educators — brings in six figures per year. Kindergarten teacher Becky Powell’s side hustle — making worksheets for other educators — brings in six figures per year.Becky Powell Powell’s store brought in $125,500 in 2022 revenue, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Her husband also sells worksheets on the platform, and they’ve used their combined earnings to fund vacations and pay down their mortgage and student loans, Powell says.

  “You have to have passion and knowledge,” she says. “You also have to have a business sense [and understand] SEO.”

  Once you gain enough customers, work to turn your sales into positive reviews, so you appear higher in platforms’ search results, Kristof advises. Customer service, prompt shipping and quality control can usually earn you a good online reputation.

  They know when to change direction or walk away

  The McCauleys have a rule for their ever-changing collection of side hustles: “You either have to be one of the first to get there, or your approach has to be very unique and different to be successful,” Sarah says.

  But being first or unique doesn’t guarantee long-term success. In 2020, the couple was early to a side hustle trend: pallet flipping. At local warehouses, they’d buy pallets of returned goods from Amazon, Walmart or Target. They’d unbox the pallets, discover their contents and resell the items for a hopeful profit.

  From December 2020 to December 2022, the McCauleys made about $19,500 in pallet-flipping profits, they estimate. Their most popular unboxing YouTube video got 5.4 million viewers, translating to an additional $30,000 in advertising revenue, says Jamie.

  Last year, more Americans hopped on the pallet-flipping trend. Pallet prices rose, resale values dropped and a slew of unboxing videos diluted the McCauleys’ viewership. “The pallets became not really worth our time ... from the standpoint of time over money,” says Sarah.

  The McCauleys filmed and posted their pallet-flipping experiences on their YouTube channel. The McCauleys filmed and posted their pallet-flipping experiences on their YouTube channel.Jamie and Sarah McCauley Four years ago, the McCauleys would’ve simply moved onto their next side hustle. Now, they’re feeling the strain of constantly building new gigs from scratch, and starting to reorganize their income streams into a smaller number of longer-term projects.

  Instead of flipping their current home renovation project in Northern Michigan for a profit, for example — something they’ve done multiple times — they’ll keep it as their own vacation house and part-time Airbnb rental, they say.

  “We always knew [side hustling] was going to have an expiration date,” says Jamie. “It’s a young person’s game, to always be looking for what’s next.”

  Want to make extra money outside of your day job? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course How to Earn Passive Income Online to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories. CNBC Make It readers can use special discount code CNBC40 to get 40% off through August 15, 2024.

  Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

  2024/07/11
• 
  

  Infoman

  The state Britain is in

  Economist (UK) 06 Jul 2024

  The state Britain is in

  ALMOST A MILLENNIUM ago, Alan Rufus, a Breton warlord, helped his kinsman William the Conqueror squish a Saxon rebellion, pillaging and slaughtering across northern England. Today the view from his ruined castle in Richmond is serene, sheep gambolling beside the River Swale as it meanders through North Yorkshire. Richmond is “a lovely, historic, thriving market town”, effuses Colin Grant, a champion of local regeneration projects, as he shows off its 18th-century theatre.

  Since 2015 Richmond’s MP has been Rishi Sunak, the (probably outgoing) Conservative prime minister. The constituency is a landscape of dry-stone walls, the blissful Yorkshire Dales, idyllic villages and pubs named after farm animals. To be sure, the locals have grievances, including over agricultural policy and rural transport. “If you look under the surface, life has become harder,” insists Daniel Callaghan, the Liberal Democrat candidate in the general election on July 4th. But there is scant deprivation or crime. What would a pensioner, relaxing in Richmond’s cobbled marketplace, like to change? “Nothing, really.”

  At what is likely to be the end of 14 years of Conservative rule—this article was published before the election result was known—there is more than one story to tell about Britain. Up close, life is more nuanced than the headline tale of dereliction and decay. The safest generalisations about a population of roughly 68m may be demographic. Since the Tories were elected in 2010 it has grown by a whopping 5m people; as immigration surged to record levels despite the vows to bring it down, it has become even more diverse. And as all countries are, Britain has been shaped by forces beyond politicians’ control: the death of the queen, a unifying figurehead; the rise of social media.

  But another way to summarise the mosaic of modern Britain is to say that its burdens have been shared unequally. Because, in some ways and places, it seems to be falling apart.

  The big picture is that public services are crumbling. Begin with the National Health Service, the most vital and cherished. Patients wait dangerously long minutes for ambulances, grim hours in emergency rooms and agonising months for treatment. Hospital performance, judges the Institute for Government, a think-tank, is arguably the worst since the NHS was created in 1948. After peaking in 2010, overall satisfaction with it has plummeted to the lowest recorded level. Meanwhile the courts are overwhelmed and prisons are bursting. Local authorities are going bust; libraries and swimming pools have closed. University finances are precarious.

  “There’s a general feeling in the country that nothing is working well,” Sir Ver

  non Bogdanor of King’s College London says delicately. The farce of High Speed 2, a botched railway project on which tens of billions were wasted, is a handy parable of wider mismanagement. The frequent dumping of sewage in the country’s waterways—including the picturesque River Swale—is another ready-made metaphor. Sometimes, amid a litany of shortages and strikes, Britain seems to be turning into a giant, dysfunctional metaphor for itself.

  The public finances, which the Tories pledged to fix, are buckling. As belt-tightening was followed by shocks and splurges, public debt has rocketed. As a share of GDP, tax is at its highest level in 70 years. The economy is limping. In real terms incomes have disappointed since the financial crisis of 2007-09, the worst period of wage stagnation in two centuries.

  Little wonder that three-quarters of Britons tell pollsters the country is in a worse state than it was in 2010. The ambient mood, reckons Jack Thorne, one of its best modern playwrights, is of “genuine confusion about why we’re in this mess”.

  Unhappy and inglorious

  Part of the background is the programme of austerity—deep, fast cuts to public spending—that began in 2010. Poor places, which rely most on state support, were hit hard. The architects of austerity “don’t know what life is like living here”, says Richard McShane, who founded the Phoenix community centre in a derelict library on the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. “We are the forgotten people.”

  Easterhouse is a landmark in Tory thinking. Its deprivation inspired Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former party leader and welfare secretary, to rethink the causes and costs of poverty. Before taking office in 2010, David Cameron, the first in a run of five Tory prime ministers ending with Mr Sunak, spoke there about what he called Britain’s “broken society”, vowing to replace despair with hope. Part of his remedy was the “Big Society”, a wishy-washy plan to galvanise community groups. Along with “levelling up” and “take back control”, the “Big Society” is among the defunct Tory slogans which, like embarrassing relatives, are no longer much mentioned.

  There have been improvements in Easterhouse. “You’ve seen ‘West Side Story’?” asks Stuart Patterson, once a teenage gang member and addict, now the pastor of a church in a dingy local shopping centre. “It was lived out in these streets.” He points out the fields that hosted gang battles in the 1980s and the roads he couldn’t walk down safely. Now the gangs have largely been tamed. A lot of the shoddy tenement housing has been replaced.

  “That’s cosmetic,” laments Mr McShane. Many of the underlying problems—ill-health, drinking, unemployment—endure. Easterhouse remains one of the most deprived parts of Scotland. Across Britain as a whole, the proportion of children living in poverty has risen. In 2022, calculated the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a think-tank, around 3.8m people experienced destitution (ie, a lack of heat, shelter or other essentials), well over double the number in 2017. Reliance on food banks has spiked, especially during the cost-of-living crunch of the past few years. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was flatlining (see chart).

  “We will not put the Union at risk,” promised the Conservative manifesto of 2010. Four years later Scotland voted against independence. Yet the union does not look entirely secure, partly because of the other, bilious referendum that followed. Voters in both Scotland and Northern Ireland opted to stay in the EU in 2016; the decision to leave bolstered the argument for divorcing Britain instead.

  Brexit was the great political rupture in the rickety Tory imperium. Its causes are debatable; the ongoing consequences are clearer. From Brexit flowed the disgrace of Boris Johnson’s premiership and the tragicomic cameo of Liz Truss’s. Chaos and distraction engulfed politics; a miasma of dishonesty seeped across it. Meanwhile longterm prospects for economic growth and productivity have been damaged further. Investment has suffered.

  Paperwork, a smaller talent pool, extra costs on imports and exports, delays: leaving the EU, says David Barnes, a ponytailed IT entrepreneur in Basildon, in south-east England, has been a bureaucratic “nightmare”. In 2016 Basildon was overwhelmingly pro-Brexit, despite (or because of) the fact that it has had little foreign immigration, one of Brexiteers’ main gripes. “It was going to be so wonderful!” a retired Basildon nurse says sardonically of the policy. Instead the country is “on its knees now. Any more and it’d be on its elbows—and your face would be in it!”

  In central Basildon, you can see what she means. The liveliest spot is a pie-and-mash café, where the menu—the other option is hot eels—is a clue to the town’s origin as a post-war alternative to London’s bombed-out East End. Boarded-up shops, a recurring sight and complaint across the country, abound. The throbbing capital is 25 miles (40km) away but feels much farther. Kathy Kentish, who runs the regional branch of Citizens Advice, a charity, says steep energy costs and higher interest rates have brought money troubles to locals who hadn’t known them before.

  A peculiarly British malaise afflicts many such towns and cities. In part that is a hangover from the pandemic, the other defining rupture of the Tory era. Other problems common to rich countries—stuttering growth, ageing populations, inflation—have contributed. But these have been exacerbated by long-term economic sclerosis, the misjudgments of austerity and Brexit. You could call the whole predicament an exercise of sovereignty, just not the kind the Brexiteers intended.

  For instance, because the NHS was creaking even before covid-19, it has recovered more slowly than other European health-care systems. Treatment backlogs, and surging mental-health complaints, have led more people to withdraw from the labour market. Around 2.8m Britons are out of work because of chronic illness (up from 2.2m in 2010).

  Young people are among the malaise’s main victims. The pandemic disrupted their education, and continues to: many more pupils are missing much more school than before it. Housing, an even more widespread worry than vacant shops, is prohibitively expensive for many. Amid strangulating planning rules, the average house price in England has risen to 8.3 times average earnings, almost double the ratio at the turn of the millennium. Housing costs are “astronomical round here”, says a 17-year-old in Basildon. According to Ipsos, a pollster, 21% of 18- to 34-year-olds were pessimistic about the economic future in 2010. Now that figure is 55%.

  Pointing out the concrete downtown buildings that are due to be redeveloped, Jessica Power, a can-do Basildon councillor, offers a summary that resonates more widely. Too many people and businesses are stuck, she says. As the town is outpaced by glitzier rivals, “People need to realise that, yeah, you can do better.”

  That judgment could apply to Britain as a whole. Some countries are forging ahead of it; others are catching up. After receding for decades, says David Kynaston, a distinguished historian, the sense of being a nation in decline has returned. Perhaps the past 14 years will be seen as the age in which Britain subsided into its fate as a “poor rich” country.

  Naturally there are bright spots—and not only in the Yorkshire Dales. London’s resilient dynamism is one—though the gap between the metropolis and the rest has stretched when it was meant to shrink. Immigration embarrassed ministers but is also a compliment. Britain, notes Ben Page of Ipsos, “remains one of the most attractive countries on Earth to outsiders”.

  Under the Tories, British pupils have risen in some international academic rankings. Renewable energy is more prevalent. Less tangibly, and inadvertently, the country may have found an overdue humility. Henceforth it may be less likely to brag about its health care or armed forces being the “best in the world”; less reflexively determined to “punch above its weight”.

  The dogs that didn’t bark

  And alongside the woes Britain has faced, consider those it dodged. Despite the efforts of some cynical politicians, American-style culture wars—over statues, history and the like—have fizzled. Britons are just a bit less excitable about that kind of thing. Theirs is still an orderly sort of country. Sir Vernon Bogdanor calls it “profoundly stable, profoundly constitutional and profoundly moderate”. In confounding times, it has once again proved less susceptible to extremism than some others.

  At least, it has proved so thus far. For another recurring theme, from Scotland to northern England and the south, is rage against politicians as a caste. “They’re all liars,” spits that retired nurse in Basildon. “They tend to be looking after themselves and to hell with the country,” thinks a farmer in Yorkshire. “All they’ve done is line their own pockets,” says a regular at the Phoenix centre in Easterhouse.

  The second world war, notes Mr Kynaston, fostered expectations of state support that lingered in Britain for 35 years. Recent trials, from the financial crash to covid-19 and beyond, have fomented similar attitudes—just as the state malfunctions. That is a corrosive tension which, for its own sake and the country’s, the next government must try urgently to resolve. ■

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/08
• 
  

  Infoman

  The building superintendent is an A.I. chatbot

  JULIE WEED

  The New York Times (International Edition) 01 Jul 2024 Technology is changing the way tenants pay rent and how units are leased

  The new maintenance coordinator at an apartment complex in Dallas has been getting kudos from tenants and colleagues for good work and late-night assistance. Previously, the eight people on the property’s staff, managing the buildings’ 814 apartments and town homes, were overworked and putting in more hours than they wanted.

  Besides working overtime, the new staff member at the complex, the District at Cypress Waters, is available 24/7 to schedule repair requests and doesn’t take any time off.

  That’s because the maintenance coordinator is an artificial intelligence bot that the property manager, Jason Busboom, began using last year. The bot, which sends text messages using the name Matt, takes requests and manages appointments.

  The team also has Lisa, the leasing bot that answers questions from prospective tenants, and Hunter, the bot that reminds people to pay rent. Mr. Busboom chose the personalities he wanted for each A.I. assistant: Lisa is professional and informative; Matt is friendly and helpful; and Hunter is stern, needing to sound authoritative when reminding tenants to pay rent.

  The technology has freed up valuable time for Mr. Busboom’s human staff, he said, and everyone is now much happier on the job. Before, “when someone took vacation, it was very stressful,” he added.

  Chatbots — as well as other A.I. tools that can track the use of common areas, monitor energy use, aid construction management and perform other tasks — are becoming more commonplace in property management. The money and time saved by the new technologies could generate $110 billion or more in value for the real estate industry, according to a report released in 2023 by McKinsey Global Institute. But A.I.’s advances and its catapult into public consciousness have also stirred up questions about whether tenants should be informed when they’re interacting with an A.I. bot.

  Ray Weng, a software programmer, learned he was dealing with A.I. leasing agents while searching for an apartment in New York last year, when agents in two buildings used the same name and gave the same answers for his questions.

  “I’d rather deal with a person,” he said. “It’s a big commitment to sign a lease.”

  Some of the apartment tours he took were self-guided, Mr. Weng said, “and if it’s all automated, it feels like they don’t care enough to have a real person talk to me.”

  EliseAI, a software company based in New York whose virtual assistants are used by owners of nearly 2.5 million apartments across the United States, including some operated by the property management company Greystar, is focused on making its assistants as humanlike as possible, said Minna Song, the chief executive of EliseAI. Aside from being available through chat, text and email, the bots can interact with tenants via voice and can have different accents.

  The virtual assistants that help with maintenance requests can ask follow-up questions like verifying which sink needs to be fixed in case a tenant isn’t available when the repair is being done, Ms. Song said. And some of the bots help renters troubleshoot maintenance issues on their own.

  Tenants with leaky toilets may receive messages with a video showing where the water shut-off valve is and how to use it while waiting for a plumber.

  The technology is so good at carrying on a conversation and asking follow-up questions that tenants often mistake the A.I. assistant for a human. “People come to the leasing office and ask for Elise by name,” Ms. Song said, adding that tenants have texted the chatbot to meet for coffee, told managers that Elise deserved a raise and even dropped off gift cards for the chatbot.

  Not telling customers that they’ve been interacting with a bot is risky. Duri Long, an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, said it could make some people lose trust in the company using the technology.

  Alex John London, a professor of ethics and computational technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, said people could view the deception as disrespectful.

  “All things considered, it is better to have your bot announce at the beginning that it is a computer assistant,” Dr. London said.

  Ms. Song said it was up to each company to monitor evolving legal standards and be thoughtful about what it told consumers. Most U.S. states do not have laws that require the disclosure of the use of A.I. in communicating with a human, and the laws that do exist primarily relate to influencing voting and sales. A bot used for scheduling maintenance or reminding tenants to pay rent wouldn’t have to be disclosed to customers. (The District at Cypress Waters does not tell tenants and prospective tenants that they’re interacting with an A.I. bot.)

  Another risk involves the information that the A.I. is generating. Milena Petrova, an associate professor who teaches real estate and corporate finance at Syracuse University, said humans needed to be “involved to be able to critically analyze any results,” especially for any interaction outside the most simple and common ones.

  Sandeep Dave, chief digital and technology officer of CBRE, a real estate services firm, said it didn’t help that the A.I. “comes across as very confident, so people will tend to believe it.”

  Marshal Davis, who manages real estate and a real estate technology consulting company, monitors the A.I. system he created to help his two office workers answer the 30 to 50 calls they receive daily at a 160-apartment complex in Houston. The chatbot is good at answering straightforward questions, like those about rent payment procedures or details about available apartments, Mr. Davis said. But on more complicated issues, the system can “answer how it thinks it should and not necessarily how you want it to,” he said.

  Mr. Davis records most calls, runs them through another A.I. tool to summarize them and then listens to the ones that seem problematic — like “when the A.I. says, ‘Customer voiced frustration,’” he said — to understand how to improve the system.

  Some tenants aren’t completely sold. Jillian Pendergast interacted with bots last year while searching for an apartment in San Diego. “They’re fine for booking appointments,” she said, but dealing with A.I. assistants instead of humans can get frustrating when they start repeating responses.

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/01
• 
  

  Infoman

  Run Run - Gum - Don’t look back

  A dancer’s reflections on fleeing the Soviet Union

  New York Times (International Edition) 01 Jul 2024

  On the night of June 29, 1974, after a performance with a touring Bolshoi Ballet troupe in downtown Toronto, Mikhail Baryshnikov made his way out a stage door, past a throng of fans and began to run.

  Baryshnikov, then 26 and already one of ballet’s brightest stars, had made the momentous decision to defect from the Soviet Union and build a career in the West. On that rainy night, he had to evade K.G.B. agents — and audience members seeking autographs — as he rushed to meet a group of Canadian and American friends waiting in a car a few blocks away.

  “That car took me to the free world,”

  Baryshnikov, 76, recalled in a recent interview. “It was the start of a new life.”

  His cloak-and-dagger escape helped to make him a cultural celebrity. “Soviet Dancer in Canada Defects on Bolshoi Tour,” The New York Times declared on its front page.

  But the focus on his decision to leave the Soviet Union has sometimes made Baryshnikov uneasy. He said he did not like how the term “defector” sounded in English, conjuring an image of a traitor who has committed high treason.

  “I’m not a defector — I’m a selector,” he said. “That was my choice. I selected this life.”

  Baryshnikov was born in Riga, the capital of Soviet-ruled Latvia, and moved to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1964, when he was 16, to study with the renowned teacher Alexander Pushkin. When he was 19, he joined the

  Kirov Ballet, now known as the Mariinsky, and quickly became a star on the Russian ballet scene.

  After his defection, he moved to New York and joined American Ballet Theater (which he later ran as artistic director) and then New York City Ballet. The pre-eminent male dancer of the 1970s and ’80s, his star power helped elevate ballet in popular culture. He has worked as an actor, appearing onstage and in several films, including “The Turning Point,” as well as the television series “Sex and the City.” And in 2005, he founded the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City, which presents dance, music and other programming.

  In recent years, Baryshnikov, who has American and Latvian citizenship, has become more vocal about politics. He has criticized former President Donald J. Trump, likening him to the “dangerous totalitarian opportunists” of his youth. He has also spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, accusing Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of creating a “world of fear.” He is a founder of True Russia, a foundation to support Ukrainian refugees.

  In an interview, Baryshnikov reflected on the 50th anniversary of his defection; the father he left behind in the Soviet Union (his mother died when he was 12); the pain he feels over the war in Ukraine; and the challenges facing Russian artists today. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

  What memories do you have of that June day in Toronto?

  I remember feeling a sense of comfort and security after seeing some very friendly faces in the getaway car. But I also felt fear that it might turn out another way — that at any second, it could fall apart and become like a bad police movie. I was beginning a new life, something totally unknown, and it was my decision and my responsibility. It was time for me to grow up.

  You have described your defection as artistic, not political, saying you wanted more creative freedom and the chance to more frequently work abroad, which the Soviet authorities would not permit.

  Of course it was a political decision, from a distance. But I really wanted to be an artist and my main concern was my dance. I was 26. That’s middle age for a classical dancer. I wanted to learn from Western choreographers. Time was running out.

  Back then you said: “What I have done is called a crime in Russia. But my life is my art, and I realized it would be a greater crime to destroy that.”

  Did I say it that eloquently? I don’t believe it. Maybe somebody corrected it with the proper grammar. But I still agree with that. I realized early on that I’m a capable dancer — that’s what I could do, and that’s about it.

  You worried that your defection might endanger your father, who was a military officer in Riga and taught military topography at the air force academy.

  I knew the K.G.B. services would be interviewing him and asking him if he was involved, and if he would write me a letter or something. He did nothing. I must say, “Thank you, Papa. Thank you for not bending over.” He refused to send me a letter, asking me to please come back.

  Did you communicate with him again?

  I sent him two or three letters saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, I hope everybody’s healthy at home.” He never responded. And then he passed away quite soon after, in 1980.

  You began studying dance at 7, and enrolled at the Riga School of Choreography, the state ballet academy, a few years later. What did your parents think of your dancing?

  They were amused that at 10 or 11 years old I belonged to some kind of professional school. But my father always said, “You’ll have to go to a real school and study arithmetic and literature, and get good marks.” I was a really bad student. He said, “If you won’t succeed in a real school, I’ll send you to military school, like Suvorov, and they will straighten you up.” He was bluffing of course. I was already deeply, deeply, deeply in love with theater. I was in love with the atmosphere — the idea that I belonged to this big beautiful circus.

  Did you feel you had to forge a new identity when you came to the West?

  I felt an enormous sense of freedom. When you don’t have authority over you, you start to have crazy ideas about yourself: “Oh, I’m like Tarzan in the jungle now.” But it was enough. I told myself: “You have to be a grownup man already. You have to do something serious.” I knew I could dance and I already had some repertoire in my luggage.

  Are you still dancing?

  Dancing is maybe a loud word, but theater directors sometimes ask, “Are you comfortable if I ask you to move?” I say absolutely. I welcome that. But I don’t miss being in a dancer’s costume.

  You have avoided politics for much of your career, but you’ve recently weighed in on a variety of issues, including the war in Ukraine. Why speak up now?

  Ukraine is a different story. Ukraine is our friend. I danced Ukrainian dances, listened to Ukrainian music and singers. I know Ukrainian ballets like “The Forest Song,” and I have performed in Kyiv. I am a pacifist and an antifascist, that is for sure. And that’s why I’m on this side of the war.

  You were born eight years after Latvia was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union; your father was one of the Russian workers sent there to teach. How does your experience growing up there affect how you see this war?

  I spent the first 16 years of my life in Soviet Latvia, and I know the other side of the coin. I was the son of an occupier. I knew that experience of living under the occupation. The Russians treated it like their territory and their land, and they said the Latvian language is garbage.

  I don’t want Putin and his army to enter Riga. Finally Latvia has real independence, and they’re doing pretty good. My mother is buried there. I feel when I’m coming to Riga, I’m coming back to my home.

  You wrote an open letter to Putin in 2022, saying he had created a “world of fear.”

  He’s a true imperialist with a totally bizarre sense of power. Yes, he speaks with the tongue of my mother, the same way she spoke. But he does not represent the true Russia.

  How have you changed since leaving the Soviet Union 50 years ago?

  I am a very lucky person. I don’t really know. I want to compose a nice kind of sentence. But it’s not exactly the time for nice sentences, when a person like Aleksei Navalny was sent to prison and destroyed for his honest life.

  Would you ever go back to Russia?

  No, I don’t think so.

  Why not?

  The idea never even comes to my mind. I have no answer for you.

  I imagine you sometimes think or dream about your time there.

  Of course. Occasionally I speak Russian, and quite often I read Russian literature. This is the language of my mother. She was a really simple woman from Kstovo, near the Volga River. I learned my first Russian words from her. I remember her voice, the specific

  Volga region kind of music. Her sounds. Her “o.” Her vowels.

  Some Russian artists, like the Bolshoi Ballet star Olga Smirnova, who is now at the Dutch National Ballet, have left Russia because of the war.

  I saw her dance in New York and met her after the show. She’s a wonderful dancer, a lovely woman, and very, very, very brave. It’s a big change to go to the Netherlands after being a principal soloist at the Bolshoi. And yet she was in great shape and showed great pride to perform with a company that adopted her. I am rooting for her.

  Are you surprised to see artists once again leaving Russia because of concerns about politics and repression?

  There is a word in Russian that refers to refugees and people who run: bezhentsy. This applies to people who are running from the bullets, from the bombs, in this war. There are some Russians — dancers and maybe athletes — who run more gracefully than others. In my very small way, I am trying to support them. In the end, we all run from somebody.

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/07/01
• 
  

  Infoman

  美國矽谷 AI 晶片新創公司 Etched，宣布成功獲得 A 輪融資 1.2 億美元，並將與台積電合作開發，目標打造能與輝達 (NVDA-US) 相互競爭的頂級 AI 晶片。

  Etched 總部與蘋果 (AAPL-US) 公司同位加州庫比蒂諾，是由哈佛輟學生 Robert Wachen、Gavin Uberti 和 Chris Zhu 兩年前創立的 AI 晶片新創公司，目前公司有 35 名員工。

  目前該公司正開發一款名為 Sohu 的晶片，將使用「Transformers」來訓練和部署人工智慧模型，與 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 的核心架構相同。

  聯合創始人兼執行長 Gavin Uberti 表示，隨著人工智慧的發展，該技術的大部分耗電運算需求將由 ASIC 晶片滿足，因僅執行其設計的 AI 模型而有高效率，與輝達強大的通用圖形處理單元 (GPU) 不同，但成本可以降低許多。

  「我們正在 AI 領域下最大賭注，如果 Transformers 跑偏了，我們就會完蛋；但若成功，Etched 將成為有史以來最大公司之一。」Uberti 說。

  Sohu 晶片採用台積電 4 奈米製程，為 ASIC 客製化硬連線晶片，因架構更簡單和用途單一，藉此提高效率，為單一設計目的 AI 模型進行運算。儘管 Sohu 整體不比輝達的通用 GPU 強大，但是在專用生成器上的速度可快上超過 10 倍，且成本更低、耗能更少。

  Etched 認為，「一台 Sohu 伺服器可取代 160 台 H100 GPU，對於需要專用晶片的企業來說，是更實惠有效率，且更環保的選擇。」

  Etched 聲稱，Sohu 晶片推理 Llama-3 70B 的速度比輝達的 H100 快 20 倍，而功耗卻大大降低。

  同為哈佛輟學生的創辦人、Etched 營運長 Robert Wachen 表示：「整個未來科技的發展，都將取決於基礎設施是否能夠承載所需的規模。」

  Etched 正準備將 Sohu 推向市場，預計今年稍晚時展示產品。Uberti 指出，透過專注於變壓器，Sohu 晶片可將更少空間分配給記憶體，從而釋放更多空間給提供運算能力的電晶體。此外，專用 AI 晶片的影響，類似 2013 年首次推出專用於挖掘比特幣或乙太坊的 ASIC，這減少對輝達 GPU 的需求。

  2013 年，專為比特幣挖礦而設計的 ASIC 晶片問世，與先前主導的 CPU 和 GPU 相比，ASIC 的挖礦效率大幅飛躍，革命性地改變比特幣挖礦格局。

  最新一輪募資籌得 1.2 億美元，由 Primary Venture Partners、Positive Sum Ventures 兩家創投公司主導，參與的知名天使投資人包括 Peter Thiel、Github 執行長 Thomas Dohmke、Coinbase 前技術長 Balaji Srinivasan、Cruise 創辦人 Kyle Vogt、Stanley Druckenmiller 等人。

  雖然 1.2 億美元已是鉅額融資，但 Etched 面對的卻是全球資本最雄厚、最具競爭力的公司，這樣的金額大約輝達半日營收。輝達的銷售額已連續三季年增率 3 倍跳，最近一季達到 260 億美元。

  據估計，輝達目前佔有 80% 以上 AI 晶片市場。儘管輝達處於領先地位，但新創晶片製造商仍前仆後繼加入市場，包括 Cerebras Systems，該公司正在建造體積更大的 AI 晶片，以及 Tenstorrent，該公司正在使用一種名為 RISC-V 的流行技術來構建 AI 晶片。

  PitchBook 數據顯示，創投公司 2023 年向人工智慧半導體公司投資了 60 億美元，略高於 2022 年的 57 億美元。

  2024/06/27
• 
  

  Infoman

  Young Influencers Face Grim Reality

  KATHERINE BLUNT

  The Wall Street Journal 17 Jun 2024 A family discovers that the followers include large numbers of adult men

  The mom started the Instagram account three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion—a way for her and her daughter, a preteen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and moms. The two bonded, she said, as they posted photos of the girl dancing, modeling and living life in their small Midwestern town.

  The mom, a former marketing manager, oversaw the account and watched as the number of followers grew. Soon, photographers offered to take professional shots for the girl. Brands began sending free apparel for her to model.

  “We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, ‘Can we send her

  dancewear?’” the mom said.

  The mom also began to notice a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the account dashboard: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.

  Men left public comments on photos of the daughter with fire and heart emojis, telling her how gorgeous she was. Those were the tamer ones. Some men sent direct messages proclaiming their obsessions with the girl. Others sent pictures of male genitalia and links to porn sites.

  Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments. At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in.

  “It just kept growing, and then the brands weren’t just dance brands anymore,” the daughter, who’s now in high school, said. “It was actually really cool.” She told her mom she wanted to become an influencer.

  The mom was torn. To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations.

  Yet the mom felt the account had brought her closer with her daughter, and even second- and third-tier influencers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. The money could help pay for college, the mom thought.

  The mom said yes. And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of men who take sexual interest in children.

  “It’s not that I liked it, ever. Ever. It just is what it is,” the mom said. At times, she’s questioned her decision to keep the account going. The account dashboard had recently put the number of male followers at 92%. At one point, she offered Instagram subscriptions to users willing to pay a monthly fee for extra photos and videos. Many of them were also men.

  Thousands of other young influencers, and their parents, have made similar calculations in using social-media sites to promote posts and products. Parents have found that Instagram, owned by Meta Platforms, is a particular problem.

  Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

  That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.

  Meta has said that it has spent more than a decade working on keeping children safe online, and developed tools, features and resources to support teens and their parents. In response to Journal articles over the past year showing how its algorithms connect pedophilic accounts and promote material that sexualizes children, the company said it took a series of measures to remove violating accounts and enhance safety.

  The company has been developing technology to identify accounts belonging to potentially suspicious adults. It said it has removed tens of thousands of such accounts in recent months.

  Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.

  ‘Gorgeous!’

  The Midwestern mom, in interviews by phone and at her home on a suburban cul-de-sac, said she tried to position herself as the barrier between her daughter and the pedophiles following along. After she learned that her daughter’s photos were trading on Telegram, she sought brand partnerships offering school and leisure outfits instead of tightfitting dancewear.

  Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations.

  Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies.

  The Instagram posts started three years ago. Her daughter had hundreds of photos from dance practice and competitions. She and her daughter enjoyed posting them and connecting with other young dancers online.

  “It felt very safe,” the mother said. “Whether or not it was, it felt that way.”

  Many followers lacked proper names and personal photos—signs of possible burner accounts for users with sexual interest in children. Some had crude or obscene usernames.

  Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate.

  Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

  When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live.

  The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers.

  While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paidsubscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

  The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different.

  “There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”

  Hundreds of accounts soon subscribed. Some were other young influencers. Many were adult men.

  Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

  Saving for college

  A straight-A student who hangs out with a small group of studious friends, the daughter talked excitedly in an interview about wanting to go to a large public university in her state. She thinks she might like to study business.

  “I definitely consider it a job,” the girl said about her account, adding that she saves almost all of her earnings for a car and for college. To date, she has saved about $20,000, her mother said.

  The mom knew there was opposition to accounts like her daughter’s. Some child-safety activists argued that parents running such accounts exploited their girls by knowingly accepting money from users who were sexually interested in the content.

  Some criticized the Midwestern mom specifically, in messages or reports to Meta. She felt unfairly targeted. She saw other accounts featuring skimpier outfits or more risqué poses.

  She had at first been vaguely aware from other influencer moms that men traded photos in private chats, she said, “but I didn’t really know what happened.”

  That changed last spring, when an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

  The mom tried to better tailor the photos and videos to reach young girls and moms. Still, she realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos.

  Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.

  The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. They concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.

  In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines.

  Meta’s internal report also had highlighted the Midwestern mom’s account as part of a look at subscribers to hundreds of popular tween and teen influencer accounts. At the time, the account had 428 subscribers, about 42% of whom had shown problematic behavior, the staffers found.

  Shut down

  The Midwestern mom had no knowledge of Meta’s internal investigation then, but she had become concerned about the prospect of losing her account. Meta, without explanation, had removed several photos she had posted for subscribers of her daughter dressed in casual clothes and athleticwear. She expressed her worry and confusion over the removals in a story posted to the account.

  The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why.

  The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

  “If I could go back, I don’t know if I would do it all again,” she said at the time. “There are too many flaws in it all.”

  The two had another account, established years earlier as a backup. The daughter told her mom she wanted to use it to rebuild her following. Her mom felt deeply conflicted, but she didn’t want to disappoint her daughter.

  The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how.

  Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts.

  The mom and daughter have been debating how to proceed. They offer some subscription content on another platform, but the majority of their followers were on Instagram. The mom said she is now considering allowing her daughter to open a new Instagram account of her own—figuring Instagram would allow that—and leaving the girl to mostly manage it herself, with some oversight and limitations.

  “She just wants to figure out how to keep working with her brands and do her job,” the mom said.

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/06/17
• 
  

  Infoman

  Scammers Pose as Businesses

  Wall Street Journal 11/6/2024

  Copycats are stepping up their attacks on small businesses.

  Sellers of products including merino socks and garden accessories said they have lost customers to online scammers who use the legitimate business owners’ videos, logos and social-media posts to assume their identities and steer customers to cheap knockoffs or simply take their money.

  “We used to think you’d be targeted because you have a brand everywhere,” said Alastair Gray, director of anticounterfeiting for the International Trademark Association, a nonprofit that represents brand owners. “It now seems with the ease at which these criminals can replicate websites, they can cut and paste everything.”

  Technology has expanded the reach of even the smallest businesses, making it easy to court customers across the globe. But evolving technology has also boosted opportunities for copycats; ChatGPT and other advances in artificial intelligence make it easier to avoid language or spelling errors, often a signal of fraud.

  Imitators also have finetuned their tactics, including by outbidding legitimate brands for top position in search results. “These counterfeiters will market themselves just like brands market themselves,” said Rachel Aronson, co-founder of Coun

  terFind, a Dallas-based brandprotection company.

  Policing copycats is particularly challenging for small businesses with limited financial resources and not many employees. Online giants such as Amazon.com and Meta Platforms said they use technology to identify and remove misleading ads, fake accounts or counterfeit products.

  “Large corporations have the in-house ability or can connect with outside counsel to monitor and take down content. They are multilingual,” said Thomas Moga, a patent attorney with Dykema. “Individuals and small businesses don’t have that at the ready. They are really at a significant disadvantage.”

  Here are two small businesses battling these challenges:

  Bee drinking cups

  Jen Rose, a ceramist in Dallas, used Instagram, TikTok and Facebook to build a following for Bee Cups, tiny porcelain vessels that hold water for bees and other pollinators. Rose has about 50 retail partners, but most of her handmade cups are sold through her website, priced at $20 to $200.

  This April, hundreds of fake listings began popping up on Amazon.com and other shopping platforms using Rose’s face and her images and videos to steal customers. Bee Cups now receives about 25

  emails a day from people complaining that the watering cups they received are made of plastic or requesting a refund.

  “They are taking my images that show my face and my employees,” said Rose, who was a professor of ceramics when she started Bee Cups in 2020. “These videos are being translated into Dutch and Swedish and being put out overseas.”

  Amazon has a zero-tolerance policy for knockoff products and acts quickly to remove copycat listings and block accounts, a spokesman said. Artificial intelligence and other technologies have improved the company’s ability to detect infringements. He said Amazon will also refund or replace items if shoppers are dissatisfied.

  Andrea Porter, a beekeeper who lives near Spokane, Wash., received a set of fake Bee Cups in May from Amazon. “They feel very cheaply made and smell awful,” said Porter. “I don’t see them being safe for any pollinators.”

  Rose offers disgruntled buyers like Porter a $15 gift card if they send in the imitation cups, which are typically shipped from China. This spring, she took to Instagram to warn her 115,000 followers about the fakes.

  The copycat explosion has had one unexpected benefit: Sales are up 30% this year. “The fact that all of my videos were mass-produced by fake companies made me so much more visible,” Rose said.

  Bee Cups recently hired a law firm that works with Amazon and other platforms to remove the fake listings, but finds it difficult to stay ahead. “I can’t pay my lawyers to go after every single site,” said Rose, who received a $27,000 legal bill for the month of April. “It feels like I’ve hit the viral mode for the scam products.”

  Merino socks

  Darn Tough Vermont, a maker of merino socks, doesn’t advertise discounts, and its markdowns are modest. That made it all the more surprising when ads started popping up on Facebook and Instagram promising large discounts on the 20-year-old company’s products.

  The ads carried Darn Tough’s logo, images, photos and wording, all scraped from the company’s website. “The more you buy, the more you save,” a banner across one ad promised. At the top was the address darn tough online. shop.

  There were few clues that the ads were fake, said Ryan Dahlstrom, global director of digital commerce for the Northfield, Vt., company. “They’d find an old ad we had run,” he said, “flip a 75% or 80% badge over that image and throw it up as a sponsored ad or a sponsored post.”

  Shoppers who took advantage of the special offers didn’t receive Darn Tough socks—or anything at all. Many called Darn Tough’s customer service line to check when their merchandise would ship or to inquire if the discounts were legit.

  “Half of my day, five days a week was spent tracking down these websites, taking down these websites,” Dahlstrom said. Platforms would sometimes take down bogus postings in days; other times, the process stretched for weeks.

  Mark Lee, chief executive of MarqVision, a brand-protection company now working with Darn Tough, said some ads retargeted consumers who went to the original Darn Tough website, while others were aimed at shoppers who searched for socks or used other specific search terms.

  The fake websites could only be reached by those receiving the bogus ads, making it tougher for Darn Tough to find them and take them down, he said.

  Meta said it uses technology to prevent fake ads from being posted and to detect and remove them from Facebook and Instagram. “It’s against our policies to run ads that deceptively try to scam people,” a Meta spokeswoman said.

  Darn Tough and some of its customers have taken to social media to warn wouldbe buyers about the fake listings. Some fans have even incorrectly posted warnings on some of Darn Tough’s official postings.

  “It became very clear,” Dahlstrom said, “that the consumer has a hard time differentiating between real and fake.”

  通過分享 PressReader

  通過新聞連接世界

  2024/06/11
• 
  

  Infoman

  Gen Z Thinks Everyone Is Doing The Heart Sign Wrong

  SARAH E. NEEDLE­MAN Change of heart

  The Wall Street Journal 10 Jun 2024 Zoomers’ vari­a­tions con­found their el­ders; ‘I feel like I’m mak­ing shadow pup­pets’

  Kim Chen has tried imitating how her Gen Z daughter poses for selfies, holding up her thumb across her index finger to form a tiny heart. Despite her best efforts, she fails to get the gesture right every time. “I can never live up to her expectation of what it should look like,” says Chen, a 56-year-old dental hygienist in the Seattle area. “I get the double eye roll.”

  Her daughter, Nicole Chen, sees anything but an expression of love.

  “It looks like she’s making a finger gun,” says the water-treatment engineer, who is 24. “Genuinely, she can’t figure it out.”

  Every generation has its own hand signal. Baby boomers brought us “peace,” Gen X introduced “high-five,” and Millennials added the “fist bump.” More recently, members of Gen Z have adopted a handful of new gestures for expressing love—contortions their elders are struggling to grasp.

  Many people are used to making a heart shape by connecting their thumbs to form the point, while curving the remaining fingers in a C shape and joining them at the tips to create the top. Millennials, and notably pop star Taylor Swift, are credited with popularizing the gesture, says body-language expert Janine Driver.

  One of the moves now being flaunted by Gen Z—a cohort generally considered to be between the ages of 18 and 27—is the tiny index-finger-thumb heart favored by Nicole Chen and other so-called zoomers.

  Another involves placing the thumb against the lower part of one’s cheek, as the other four fingers form a C shape and the fingertips rest along the cheekbone.

  A third variation is to join one’s index fingers, while curving and then connecting the middle fingers, or vice versa. Every other digit is left hanging to the side.

  “It’s chic, sophisticated and streamlined,” says Faith Andrews-O’Neal, a 22-year-old consultant for a talent agency in New York. The “old way,” she says, “looks more like a garlic clove upside down” than a heart.

  Her 37-year-old manager, Ed Victori, describes her Gen Z approach as “origami” of the fingers because of how challenging it is for him to pull off. “I feel like I’m making shadow puppets,” he says. “It seems like there’s a lot of extraneous things happening.”

  The moves—and others that aren’t as well known, such as heart shapes with cat and bunny ears—originated in South Korea before spreading to the U.S. in recent years through K-pop artists like BTS, NewJeans and Stray Kids, said Stephanie Choi, a postdoctoral associate of the Asia Research Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The tiny heart is most associated with BTS, whose members displayed it during a 2022 photo with President Biden.

  In some cases, new hand gestures come about naturally in response to technological changes. Consider that due to the proliferation of smartphones in the late 2000s, members of Gen Z—and of their younger followers, Gen Alpha— tend to signal they’re answering a call or taking a photo differently than older generations.

  But Gen Z’s new approach to the heart symbol speaks more to zoomers’ desire to put their own spin on just about everything, according to Connor Blakley, who is 24 and runs a marketing agency in Nashville, Tenn. That includes their take on flared jeans, jewelry, slang and hair styles.

  “If there are opportunities to improve or enhance something viewed as outdated, Gen Z will certainly take advantage,” he says. “They are actively participating in counterculture.”

  Adopting new hand gestures makes sense for zoomers since they’re used to communicating nonverbally through the likes of emojis, GIFs and memes, says Rutgers University communications professor Mark Beal. He’s been compiling a glossary of Gen Z terminology for years that currently has more than 200 entries. “The heart symbol ties into this,” he says.

  Not all zoomers have gotten the message. Pro-basketball star Caitlin Clark, 22, has been photographed making the classic heart shape with her hands. A representative for the Indiana Fever guard didn’t respond to a request for comment.

  Some people have taken a stand for or against Gen Z’s hand-heart methods, with posts featuring hashtags such as #handhearts increasing exponentially over the past year. In one TikTok video, a creator with long, red-painted nails describes the new four-finger style as supreme. “This is the only heart that makes physical and logical sense,” she says. In another, a woman gives the zoomer gesture a whirl, only to joke “my carpel tunnel doesn’t want me doing this.”

  Brandon Hanks, 42, works at a university full of Gen Z students. Given his old age, he says he’s proud that he recently perfected the four-finger version he sees them make. “It looks more difficult” to master than the Millennial version—“and it is!” says the educational-technology researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

  Hanks was motivated to nail the Gen Z gesture in part because he belongs to a runners’ club called the Heartbreakers. But he won’t be showing off his new skill while he’s on the move. “You can’t do it running,” he says. “Your arms are just swinging too much.”

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/06/10
• 
  

  Infoman

  Jobs Grow For Autistic Employees Beyond Tech Firms

  PREETIKA RANA

  The Wall Street Journal 10 Jun 2024

  More companies are tapping a reservoir of talent the tech industry has used to develop better artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and other products: the autistic.

  Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and other tech giants have long had programs to recruit and retain employees whose brains process information in ways that aren’t typical. Now banks, retailers and others are recognizing the special skills of those with autism and other types of neurodivergence.

  The disproportionate number of people with neurodivergence in tech has been known for years. Elon Musk has publicly said he has Asperger’s syndrome. Sam BankmanFried has requested access to his ADHD medicine in prison.

  Alex Karp, chief executive of AI software company Palantir Technologies, called himself a “hyper, inexplicably dyslexic outsider” at an event last month. “Tech is maximally tolerant of any personality if you’re delivering,” he said.

  As the focus on people’s mental health has increased since Covid-19, more companies are discovering that atypical ways of thinking can be a qualification rather than a disability.

  Specialists said some autistic workers have the ability to work long hours on repetitive tasks such as labeling photos and videos for computer-vision systems to train AI. Oth

  ers have a knack for pattern recognition that makes them good at identifying gaps in cybersecurity or spotting tiny errors in reams of code. They can also be creative and hyperfocused.

  Jonathan Moore, 26 years old, studied computer science in college but struggled to land a job for years. He said he is strong at programming but couldn’t do the usual parttime jobs or internships during school because of the stress of interacting with too many people.

  He eventually landed a job as a software engineer at Deutsche Bank because it allowed him to do his interview online and offered the flexibility to work from home.

  “It’s just a lot less pressure” not having to deal with people face to face, he said.

  Greater focus

  Ernst & Young’s neurodivergent workforce has grown more than 10-fold from four years ago, with most of hiring taking place in the past two years. This is, in part, because some are great at doing things like labeling for generative artificial intelligence, said Hiren Shukla, who leads the company’s neurodiversity efforts.

  “GenAI has put an even greater focus on neurodivergent employees,” he said.

  The accounting firm’s neurodivergent employees have built systems that can write contracts or scan reams of company documents like emails and memos to identify tax deductions.

  Many neurodivergent workers still struggle to find work. Research before the pandemic suggested that about 50% of autistic adults in the U.S. were unemployed.

  That is slowly changing, said Marcia Scheiner, president of Integrate Autism Employment Advisors, a New York-based nonprofit that helps place autistic workers. “You would have companies who’d say, ‘I know nothing about this,’” a few years ago, she said. “That stigma or the fear factor is largely gone.”

  The group’s early placements were with tech companies, she said, but increasingly other sectors including consumer goods, media and financial services are finding ways to recruit the neurodivergent.

  Rachel Lowenstein used to beat herself up for being unable to think on her feet during group meetings, eroding her confidence at work.

  Around the time she was diagnosed with autism in 2020, her company—advertising agency Mindshare—made supporting people like herself a part of her job.

  Last year, she worked on neurodivergence campaigns for Google, Getty Images and others. Lowenstein helped Google curate its first neuroinclusive event, which featured sensory rooms, weighted blankets and fidget toys for participants.

  Lowenstein has learned to change how she interacts with people at work—by getting early downloads of what will be presented at meetings, for example—and now offers career tips to autistic workers on social media.

  New tools

  More companies are becoming open to making accommodations and navigating the challenges that come with hiring neurodivergent employees. Those hurdles include training managers to be more communicative and creating more ways to do job interviews and meetings online.

  Startup Inclusively has built a chatbot for people who might not feel comfortable reaching out to human resources for help. It can tell employees about under-the-radar benefits from their employer, such as subscriptions to meditation apps to help with anxiety, noise-canceling headphones and transcription services for hard-to-follow meetings, co-founder Charlotte Dales said.

  Some companies are redesigning their floor plans to account for their neurodivergent workforce.

  Last year, Salesforce redesigned its Chicago office to include mindfulness rooms and focus pods. SAP built a sensory relaxation room at its Prague office last year where employees can lounge around on bean bags armed with eye masks.

  The company recently told all managers to be clear and direct while giving feedback during performance reviews. It previously offered that guidance only to managers with neurodivergent reports, because those employees often struggle to read between the lines, said Sarah Loucks, who leads SAP’s Autism at Work program.

  Microsoft learned that neurodivergent candidates felt more at ease receiving sample questions ahead of interviews. It now offers mock questions to any candidate who requests them. The company has hired hundreds of neurodivergent individuals through a diversity program that started in 2015, said Neil Barnett, Microsoft’s inclusive hiring and accessibility director.

  But the neurodivergent demographic that comes through the regular hiring process is much larger, and such candidates are increasingly likely to declare themselves, he said.

  Gary Hayslip, a cybersecurity expert and father to two sons with autism, helped his boys navigate a more accepting job market. His younger son taught himself how to code and got a tech job. His older son took years to get employed.

  The 28-year-old had an impressive memory but didn’t do well reading facial cues. Hayslip ran mock interview drills and encouraged him to disclose his condition so any stoic expressions wouldn’t count against him. He landed a job last year, helping people requesting health services with the County of San Diego.

  A decade ago, people would say, “What the hell are you talking about? You’re making excuses for your child,” Hayslip said.

  Now, he said, “everybody seems to know somebody” who is neurodivergent.

  Shared via PressReader

  connecting people through news

  2024/06/10