Conferencing Quotes

I. Those of us born by water are never afraid enough of drowning. Bruises used to trophy my knees from my death-defying tree climb jumps. Growing up, my backyard was a forest of blackberry bushes. I learned early nothing sweet will come to you unthorned. II. At twelve your body becomes a currency. So Jenny and I sat down and cut up all our clothes into nothing. That year I failed math class but knew the exact number of calories in a carrot stick. I learned early being desired goes hand in hand with hunger. III. The last time I tried to scream I felt my father climbing up through my throat and into my mouth. IV. There is a certain kind of girl who reads Lolita at fourteen and finds religion. I painted my eyes black and sucked barroom cherries to red my tongue. There was a boy who promised Judas really did love Jesus. I learned early every kiss and betrayal are up for interpretation. V. I think he must have conferenced with my nightmares on exactly how to hurt me. VI. He never broke my heart. He only turned it into a compass that always points me back to him.

Um..." Hazel faltered. "You mean you won't... you're not going to-" "Claim your life?" Thantos asked. "Well, let's see..." He pulled a pure-black iPad from thin air. Death, tapped the screen a few times, and all Frank could think was: Please don't let there be an app for reaping souls. "I don't see you on the list," Thantos said. "Pluto gives me specific orders for escaped souls, you see. For some reason, he has not issued a warrant for yours. Perhaps he feels your life is not finished, or it could be n oversight. If you'd like me to call and ask-" "No!" Hazel yelped. "That's okay." "Are you sure?" Death asked helpfully. "I have video-conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address here somewhere...

Something in me hates this confession. I do not think that I am alone in this. Twitter, Facebook, virtual conferencing—these allow us the illusion of being somewhere other than where we are. Positively we have a voice in places otherwise absent to us. But we type on our keyboards while sitting in a chair where we are—the local knowledge and work of the day in our place awaiting our presence. The danger here is that it allows us to give our gifts without giving ourselves.

But what if you can’t find a colleague with a compatible schedule? When Taylor went away to speak at a conference for a week, I needed to re-create the experience of making an effort pact with another person. Thankfully, I found Focusmate. With a vision to help people around the world stay focused, they facilitate effort pacts via a one-to-one video conferencing service. While Taylor was away, I signed up at Focusmate.com and was paired with a Czech medical school student named Martin. Because I knew he would be waiting for me to co-work at our scheduled time, I didn’t want to let him down. While Martin was hard at work memorizing human anatomy, I stayed focused on my writing. To discourage people from skipping their meeting times, participants are encouraged to leave a review of their focus mate.5 Effort pacts make us less likely to abandon the task at hand. Whether we make them with friends and colleagues, or via tools like Forest, SelfControl, Focusmate, or kSafe, effort pacts are a simple yet highly effective way to keep us from getting distracted.

The current coronavirus crisis continues to have a significant impact on the economy, employment, and people’s lives in general. And, as many meetings are now conducted on Zoom, Skype, or some other cloud-based video conferencing service, it is even having a psychological impact for those fortunate enough to be employed.

We are hard-wired to engage with those we trust, and this hard-wiring has led to a constant push for greater interaction and connection on the Web.

Some technologies take several decades to reach mainstream adaptation because they were waiting on many other things to reach a certain level of maturity or accessibility. For example, in order for video conferencing technologies like Facetime and Zoom to reach mainstream adaptation, it needed the following things to reach greater maturity and accessibility — camera technology, smartphone popularity, computer chip manufacturing, silica mining, copper mining, fiber optic cable distribution, 4G communication technology and more. The magic happens in the convergence.

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.

Face Time Human beings are animals that drink in their surroundings by hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and seeing what is around them. They take each's other measure by being with each other; indeed, there is a growing body of research that suggests that they “thin slice” judgments of each other using information gathered from all the senses simultaneously. We are fans of the phone and video conferencing, and they work to build trust as well, but building trust over phone and video takes more time than face-to-face. Sitting down and sharing a meal with a potential client is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to build trust with them. That said, don't rush things. Trust cannot be expedited. Talk on the phone once or twice, then ping them with “I'm going to be in San Diego. I'd love to put a face to a name. Are you open for lunch?

This single team finds it easy to communicate about proposed changes and refactorings, and typically has a good sense of ownership. Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Instead of a single, geolocated team owning our catalog service, suppose that teams in the UK and India both are actively involved in changing a service — effectively having joint ownership of the service. Geographical and time zone boundaries here make fine-grained communication between those teams difficult. Instead, they rely on more coarse-grained communication via video conferencing and email. How easy is it for a team member in the UK to make a simple refactoring with confidence? The cost of communications in a geographically distributed team is higher, and therefore the cost of coordinating changes is higher. When the cost of coordinating change increases, one of two things happen. Either people find ways to reduce the coordination/communication costs, or they stop making changes. The latter is exactly how we end up with large, hard-to-maintain codebases.

I am passionate about bringing history to life for students. I share my knowledge of many branches of history including Medieval, local rural, American Revolution, Pioneer, and Vikings. I also enjoy teaching traditional/period dancing. I teach students about the past by re-enacting historical characters as a guest presenter at Ontario schools and also through Video Conferencing technology internationally.

For example: scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and elsewhere are experimenting with automatic “rapport detection” within groups. Sensors embedded in a conference room or in video-conferencing equipment unobtrusively monitor group members’ nonverbal behavior (their facial expressions, hand motions, gaze direction, and so on); these data are analyzed in real time to yield a measure of how well a group is cooperating. When rapport falls below a critical level, nudges can be applied to move the group toward greater cohesion: the system might alert the group’s leader that a shared coffee break is in order, or it might suggest to him, via a pop-up message, that he engage in more mirroring of his co-workers. Inside wired-up “smart meeting rooms,” it may even elect to raise the temperature by a few degrees, or introduce some soothing white noise.

Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL, a computer conferencing system that Brand launched in 1985.

Are you sure?’ Death asked helpfully. ‘I have video-conferencing enabled. I have his Skype address here somewhere

No matter how many e-mails they send or receive, no matter how kept in the loop they are, they are missing all the social time, the gaps, the nuance . . . the humanity of being around other humans. But what do we do in hard times when we need good ideas most? We cut back on conferences and business trips because video conferencing and webinars are cheaper. Perhaps. But only in the short term. Given how relatively new social media is, the long-term impact of all this dehumanizing is still yet to be fully realized.

GKPI is our religion. And it reflects in all kinds of big and small ways in the way we work. Our office doesn’t have a TV screen playing CNBC or any other news; our lone TV screen is used only for video conferencing. The only Bloomberg terminal we have is in the corner of our office pantry; it remains unused and unwatched probably 99 percent of the time. We never discuss recent company news or share prices in our team meetings. I mainly read physical newspapers, in which the information is always one day late. We have never bought or sold a single business based on news flow and never will.

Xerox had an attractive financial model focused on leasing and servicing machines and selling toner, rather than big-ticket equipment sales. For Xerox and its salespeople, this meant steadier, more recurring income. With a large baseline of recurring revenues, budgets were more likely to be met, which allowed management to give accurate guidance to stock analysts. For customers, the cost of leasing a copier is accounted for as an operating expense, which doesn’t usually entail upper management approval as a capital purchase might. As a near-monopoly manufacturer of copiers, Xerox could reduce costs by building more of a few standard models. As owner of a fleet of potentially obsolete leased equipment, Xerox might prefer not to improve models too quickly. As Steve Jobs saw it, product people were driven out of Xerox, along with any sense of craftsmanship. Nonetheless, in 1969, Xerox launched one of the most remarkable research efforts ever, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), without which Apple, the PC, and the Internet would not exist. The modern PC was invented at PARC, as was Ethernet networking, the graphical user interface and the mouse to control it, email, user-friendly word processing, desktop publishing, video conferencing, and much more. The invention that most clearly fit into Xerox’s vision of the “office of the future” was the laser printer, which Hewlett-Packard exploited more successfully than Xerox. (I’m watching to see how the modern parallel, Alphabet’s moonshot ventures, works out.) Xerox notoriously failed to turn these world-changing inventions into market dominance, or any market share at all—allowing Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and others to build behemoth enterprises around them. At a meeting where Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of ripping off Apple’s ideas, Gates replied, “Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke in to steal his TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

Even when an encounter occurs, the term “mediation” is not a fitting description of what could happen. In a mediated conflict or dispute, parties are assumed to be on a level moral playing field, often with responsibilities that may need to be shared on all sides. While this sense of shared blame may be true in some criminal cases, in many cases it is not. Victims of rapes or even burglaries do not want to be known as “disputants.” In fact, they may well be struggling to overcome a tendency to blame themselves. At any rate, to participate in most restorative justice encounters, a wrongdoer must admit to some level of responsibility for the offense, and an important component of such programs is to name and acknowledge the wrongdoing. The neutral language of mediation may be misleading and even offensive in many cases. Although the term “mediation” was adopted early on in the restorative justice field, it is increasingly being replaced by terms such as “conferencing” or “dialogue” for the reasons outlined above. • Restorative justice is not primarily designed to

Like mediation programs, many restorative justice programs are designed around the possibility of a facilitated meeting or an encounter between victims, offenders, and perhaps community members. However, an encounter is not always chosen or appropriate. Moreover, restorative approaches are important even when an offender has not been apprehended or when a party is unwilling or unable to meet. So restorative approaches are not limited to an encounter. Even when an encounter occurs, the term “mediation” is not a fitting description of what could happen. In a mediated conflict or dispute, parties are assumed to be on a level moral playing field, often with responsibilities that may need to be shared on all sides. While this sense of shared blame may be true in some criminal cases, in many cases it is not. Victims of rapes or even burglaries do not want to be known as “disputants.” In fact, they may well be struggling to overcome a tendency to blame themselves. At any rate, to participate in most restorative justice encounters, a wrongdoer must admit to some level of responsibility for the offense, and an important component of such programs is to name and acknowledge the wrongdoing. The neutral language of mediation may be misleading and even offensive in many cases. Although the term “mediation” was adopted early on in the restorative justice field, it is increasingly being replaced by terms such as “conferencing” or “dialogue” for the reasons outlined above.

The market-development problem in the case of both neural networking software and desktop video conferencing is this: With each of these exciting, functional technologies it has been possible to establish a working system and to get innovators to adopt it. But it has not as yet been possible to carry that success over to the early adopters. As we shall see in the next chapter, the key to winning over this segment is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist. This benefit is typically symbolized by a single, compelling application, the one thing that best captures the power and value of the new product. If the marketing effort is unable to find that compelling application, then market development stalls with the innovators, and the future of the product falls through the crack.