Tag Archives: curation

Articles I Like: 21 HR Jobs of the Future

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
August 13 2020

Harvard Business Review’s mailing include a link to a cool article by Jeanne C. Meister about what HR people will be doing in the future, or doing “more of” in the future, given the impact of COVID-19 and the likely enduring switch to working from home. It’s based on a think piece from one of the thousands of organizations looking at the “future of work”, and there are tons of these reports coming out, as they have for the last five years. Most of them are, quite frankly, wrong. They’re pie-in-the-sky visions of “what could be”, not very practically tied to the current environment. In order for most of the predictions to come true, we would need to see a massive disruption in the workplace and workforce.

Like COVID-19 has now done, which makes some of the more recent predictions more closely tied to reality.

The report outlines 21 different job functions that HR people expect to see in the next 10 years and plots them on a 2×2 grid of how “techy” the companies are and time.  » Read the rest

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Articles I Like: How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
November 29 2018

On the rare days that I allow myself to dream that I will eventually make the time to write some more fiction, I dabble in reading interesting tidbits that resonate with me in terms of what I want to do as a writer. Not always “writing advice”, sometimes it is just about the industry, publishing, etc. Rarely do I find much in the way of real writing advice that I think, “Yes, that’s good stuff right there. I should bookmark that!”.

Way back in 2014, one of my regular feeds, The Passive Voice, shared excerpts from Gizmodo’s sub-website “i09” about science fiction writing entitled How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story. Most of the time, I wouldn’t even bother to click on a title like that…too clickbait-y, and honestly, rarely does it live up to the premise. Often the writer will include examples of their own work, and the author isn’t usually that well-known.  » Read the rest

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Articles I Like: Tracking Emerging Cryptomining Threats

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 13 2018

The WordPress security plugin, Wordfence, published a blog entry describing how one of its techs working on cracking malware goes about doing the various steps in a recent day, analysing and developing responses to specific threats.

While the post seems at first to be highly technical, it’s quite readable by the informed layperson, and quite interesting to see. It also dispels the cryptocurrency baitclick headline to note it could have been running anything off the site, it just happened to be doing CCs.

One of our sources of threat data at Defiant is cleaning hacked websites. In this case, Ivan, a member of our SST team had cleaned a hacked site and handed me the forensic data for analysis. The site had been hacked for months before the owner discovered that it had been compromised.

My normal routine is to start by verifying the files we already detect to check if there is any new information inside any of them. 

  » Read the rest
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Articles I Like: Focus on the Fight: Writing Action Scenes That Land the Punch

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
May 1 2018

Often when I read writing tips, there is very little sense of balance. Most of them come down to a single form: “Do X, not Y”, with the small caveat that you can do Y if you do it well. The classic “Show, don’t tell” is a perfect example…except in some cases, a simple exposition deals with an info gap to get people to the next plot point. In that case, a little exposition can go a long way to avoiding stopping the action, jumping somewhere else to “show it”. Another classic used to be “Don’t use multiple points-of-view”. And then someone comes out with a fantastic book where they use multiple POV to great success. Because they did it right. Which means, often the real advice is “Do X, not Y unless you’re better than average and can actually do Y well, but know that it often doesn’t work for a lot of writers”.  » Read the rest

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Articles I Like: Astronomy Calendar for May 2018

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
April 30 2018

For those not active in astronomy circles, there is a website called Cloudy Nights for all things astro related i.e. where astronomers can go to talk about astronomy when there are “cloudy nights”. Each month, they publish the detailed Celestial Calendar (by Dave Mitsky). Here are some of the highlights for May (times converted to Ottawa time):

May 4/5th — The peak of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower (20 per hour for northern hemisphere observers) occurs at 03h00 (May 5); the Moon, Mars, and Pluto lie within a circle of diameter 4.81 degrees at 19h00 (May 5)

May 7: Last Quarter Moon occurs at 22h09 (7th);

May 8: Jupiter is opposition (angular size 44.8”, magnitude -2.5) at 20h00

May 15: New Moon occurs at 07:48; the Moon is 8.7 degrees south-southeast of the bright open cluster M45 (the Pleiades or Subaru) in Taurus at 18:00; Venus is at perihelion (0.7184 astronomical units from the Sun) at 19:00

May 21: First Quarter Moon occurs at 23h49;

May 29: Full Moon, known as the Milk or Planting Moon, occurs at 10h19; the Moon is 8.8 degrees north of Antares at 15h00

May 29/30: Mercury is 4.5 degrees south-southeast of M45 at 03h00 (30th)

For the planets:

During May, Venus shines prominently in the evening sky.

  » Read the rest
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