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Books written by Ray Sullivan

Monday 30 June 2014

Google's Glass Half Full

Like many others in the UK I received an email from Google last week inviting me to buy a pair of Google Glass.  I registered an interest last year when the programme was launched, not necessarily to spend £1000 but to get more information.  Since that time I've heard nothing from Google (but of course they've provided plenty of information on their website), however there's been plenty reported in the press in that time.

It seems that Glass has had a bit of a rough ride in some states in the US, less so in others.  There was the case where a Glass wearer was approached by the FBI after wearing a pair to the cinema.  That showed a limitation in the device, especially as film piracy is a federal offence in the US.  Today it was announced that wearing Glass in UK cinemas was not going to be permitted. Then there has been a raft of pre-emptive decisions by citizens running businesses who have decided themselves they don't want Glass wearers in their establishments.  I guess they don't want to lose a large share of their customer base due to fears of privacy infringement caused by a minority.  I expect some UK establishments would take a similar view.  We're already believed to be the country with the most CCTV per capita without citizens adding to the list.

Over here in the UK the reaction to Glass has been muted anyway.  Fair enough we're in the middle of a series of prosecutions of celebrities who have allegedly abused their celebrity status to take advantage of fans and friends of family.  Some previously regarded 'national treasures' are now either in gaol or about to go there.  So putting yourself in a position that people could think you're a closet pervert is good enough reason to not spend that grand, because there's enough opportunity to film legitimatelyon your mobile phone in plain sight without resorting to covert methods.

Even if you are confident enough to try and wear these devices in public, there are still issues.  A British newspaper recently carried out tests that showed Glass wearers could capture PIN data being input into an ATM.  You could probably do that without Glass, but they allow you to record the activity and replay until you've worked out the correct combination.  As I can barely remember my own PIN, recording someone else's is probably the only way I'd manage to steal it, if that was my aim. Other concerns have been aired, such as capturing information on computer screens.  Google have played down these risks by suggesting that the camera isn't actually that good (despite their website suggesting it was actually quite reasonable) and saying that as the screen lights up when in use it should be obvious when someone is using Glass.  Maybe, but we're not all that observant, so I'm unconvinced.

One of the features suggested by Google is the ability to use Glass as a sat nav device on the road.  The British driving authorities have roundly suggested that drivers are not to use devices like Glass while driving, as it could present a distraction.  I'm sure that will be ignored, as the use of hand held mobile phones while driving appears to have been ignored, however the UK has just quadrupled the potential fines for such offences, up to an eye watering £10,000, so perhaps Glass might make a headline for itself by being the first to get the top fine?  Several US states are understood to have taken a similar stance regarding banning Glass use while driving, for much the same reasons.

So, we won't want to wear Glass in public for fear of being branded a pervert or a data thief, we certainly can't wear them in cinemas and forget about wearing them when you are driving.  You can use them in the  privacy of your own home, but I'm struggling to see the advantage.  I guess my £1000 is not going anywhere near Google for some time, at least until I can see a legitimate reason for using them.

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Monday 16 June 2014

Flying Saucery

As a sometime Sci-Fi author I should be grateful for the concept of flying saucers - every fictional genre needs its own consistent back story. As a general rule I've tended to create my own back stories and so far have managed to avoid both little green men (I'm colour blind, so it wouldn't make sense anyway) and I've definitely avoided flying saucers. In fact my forays into how we could potentially be visited by aliens has included travel on the back of a comet and bacterial infection from space via meteorites.  Interestingly both concepts have been mooted in the serious scientific press in the years since I wrote about them, but of course I'm naturally selective about which ideas to remind you all of.

I have a strange position on flaying saucers, UFOs and alien visitors. The science fact part of me understands the rational, science based limitations on travel between adjacent star systems which, if you factor in the general theory of relativity makes the likelihood of us being visited highly unlikely.  Probably as unlikely as me winning the National Lottery, in fact.  However, despite the appalling odds and my mathematics degree I still find myself buying the ticket, in part because half of what I pay goes to good causes and anyway, someone wins most weeks.

But the bit that really skews my views is that I saw and reported a UFO sighting when I was a teenager. I couldn't explain what I saw back then, can't now, so I'm pulled between my memories and my logic.  It was October 1970 or maybe 1971.  I was walking with two friends across a field towards Ewloe Castle - the same Tudor edifice that I described in Skin - and the time was just before 8 PM.  There was a flash of sheet lightning without an accompanying crash of thunder.  We all saw the flash and I noted the time.  Three minutes later, chatting away like only teenagers do, there was another flash.  Irrationally I decided to see if there would be another flash three minutes hence, so was the only one of the three looking towards the sky when the third and final flash took place, at about the three minute mark.  Directly in my line of sight, illuminated for a fraction of a second, were three egg shapes in a sort of vee formation. The sky was rendered milky white by the lightning flash and the three egg shapes were marginally whiter.  A fraction of a second later the sky was dark again, the shapes were nowhere to be seen and my friends were still looking at the ground avoiding stepping in something mucky while I was trying to get their attention.

Anyway, I drew a picture when I got home and wrote a letter to the Ministry of Defence who replied some time later to state that there was no aircraft activity recorded in that area at that time.  They were adamant that I hadn't seen anything and as I've gotten older, I've tended to believe them.  I certainly haven't experienced anything like it since.  Yet my memory has remained remarkably consistent over the years.

I hadn't given this event a thought for some time, not even when writing my science fiction stories, but tonight I stumbled over the origin of the term 'flying saucer'.  It's an interesting tale because the phrase has embedded itself into the culture of science fiction and the whole UFO scene.  It seems that one of the earliest reports of flying craft was reported in 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold observed craft scooting across his path while flying.  When he landed he gave a potted report to friends at his local airport and took off to carry out a flying job.  By the time he returned the press had descended on the airport and he undertook a number of interviews.  Now it seems that Kenneth was highly consistent in his accounts of what he believed he saw and he has been keen to emphasis he never coined the phrase 'flying saucers'. He did, apparently, state that the erratic movement of the craft he saw was akin to saucers being skimmed across a pond.  Somewhere along the way a reporter, maybe an editor, changed that to 'flying saucers' and the phrase stuck.  Importantly many of the subsequent sightings of UFOs included the assertion that they were flying saucers.  Perhaps we see what we are conditioned to expect? Maybe the reporter's misquote was fortuitous.

Kenneth was convinced he saw something that day and reported four more sightings in the following years.  I haven't, maybe I'm too busy watching where I'm stepping, perhaps I'm too keen to stay indoors after dark, or might I be worried that I'll see something unexplainable for a second time, something that contradicts my science sensible head.  Because if there one thing I believe in less than flying saucers, it's coincidences.

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Saturday 14 June 2014

Smashwords Improves Author Tools

I've been critical about the paucity of information available to authors in previous blogs. The playing field is far from level, nor is it consistently ploughed. Amazon, for example, lets me know instantly if I have sold a book, which one it is, how little royalty I will get and which of its regions it was bought in. This is as good as it gets in self publishing and probably a heck of a lot more than you get in traditional bookselling. They've made it easier to see when you've sold a book but paradoxically it gets harder once you know. But at least they tell you. Mind, you have to look, no advice emails from them.

Smashwords email you whenever anyone buys one of your books direct from them, so that's helpful. However selling books is a bit of a sideline for them, their core strength is distribution through Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc. So those emails are generally few and far between, for me anyway.  However Smashwords are constantly looking for ways to improve their services to authors - their view is that if we authors don't sell books, they don't get paid.  They already provide a certain amount of information regarding sales, but unless the sales are directly through them you won't find out for maybe a month or more, and then you've still got one heck of a wait for payment from the likes of Apple, B&N et al before Smashwords can tee up your quarterly payments.

Like many Smashwords authors I pop onto my dashboard several times a week, mosey through the graphs showing how many pageviews each book has had, how many 20% downloads have occurred, I take a peek at the sales log that shows how many books are recorded at Apple, Kobo etc, bearing in mind this data is inevitably very old by the time I get to see it, and I then often take a peek at the site updates.  The site updates is the forum where Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, passes on information to the authors.  Sometimes you get three updates in a week, other times there are no updates for up to three weeks.  The other night I was popping into this forum to see if anything new had been posted to see a request from Mark to the first twenty respondents with a bit of free time to carry out some beta testing on some new features.  Normally I would pass on something like that as it was mid week, but I'd just come out of hospital after a minor op and was convalescing for the rest of the week.  So I threw my hat in the ring and, once Mark had secured twenty volunteers, the posting disappeared.  So not only can I tell you about the new features in Smashwords announced today, I can actually say I had a small part in their gestation!

The first item I looked at is a feature called 'daily sales'.  Now although Apple, B&N etc data is often quite old by the time we get to see it on Smashwords, it appears that the companies involved pass the data to Smashwords frequently, some pass it daily.  It's unaudited, but I suspect correct in the main, and Smashwords are now presenting that data to us authors through the dashboard.  When you enter it, you are advised graphically and numerically of all the sales you've had in the last 30 days - I'm told that when the database has been running for a while they will increase that range, possibly to 90 days.  You can see which sellers have sold books, which books have been sold, how many were free downloads (if you permit them) but you can't see where the books were bought from.  You'd have to wait until the audited data appeared to find that out, but at least you can now tell almost within 24 hours if you've had sales in these channels, which is useful if you've been running a promotion.

You still have to look to see if you've made any sales, unless they are direct from Smashwords, but at least we can find out how sales are going on a daily basis. The routine appears bug free - there was an issue with displaying the graphics on some versions of Internet Explorer but the Smashwords software team have aced that problem. It's a really useful tool for Smashwords authors and one to keep the pressure on the big A.

It wasn't the only new tool I was asked to test, but as the other tool hasn't been released yet I have to stay quiet. It's a very useful promotional tool that works very well, although there is at least one software issue that I've identified, however once released I'm sure all Smashwords authors will get a lot of use out of it. Watch this space for more news.

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Friday 6 June 2014

Sarcasm detector required

It's one of those national stereotypes, you know, the offensive ones that the perpetrators don't realise are offensive. Usually aimed at a whole nation, like any modern nation could consistently have one trait. So, not all Germans eat sausages, not all French people think eating the leg of a frog is great and I guess not all Brits speak like Bertie Wooster. In fact, I doubt any Brits do, outside of TV land.

We cultivate these stereotypes because it's an easy, and lazy, way to define what we see as different to us, as a nation. Eating any part of a frog is considered to be weird in the UK, but secretly we probably eat as many sausages per capita as the Germans. But we think our choice of sausages to be better. Naturally we share a lot with our continental neighbours - when we haven't been at war with them we've been spending a lot of time in each others company. We haven't had a decent spat with either the French or the Germans for nearly seventy years now, so that means we should be a lot closer than historically.  I'm still not keen on eating frog parts, mind.

We also share a lot with our US cousins, hence the famous 'special relationship' politicians, mainly British ones, like to mention. But we are as different as we are the same, I guess, and one area Brits like to think they have an upper hand in is in humour. Sure, the UK has exported its fair share of humour, from Monty Python to Douglas Adams, and good British comedic writers make a healthy living in tinsle town. It's probably true that we have a slightly more understated style of humour to that coming over the pond, but from personal experience I know many Americans have a much more subtle sense of humour than US television might suggest sometimes. It's a running gag in the UK, with very little evidence I can find to support it, that Americans have had an irony by-pass and wouldn't recognise sarcasm if they tripped over it.

Like I say, there is little formal evidence for this apparent difference, but now it seems the Secret Service is trying to put the record straight.  Ironically, over this side of the pond, we regard the UK Secret Service to be, well, secret.  To the point that we don't know who are the agents and their activities are traditionally carried out under a cloak of secrecy.  The US Secret Service, however, is often portrayed as being quite open about itself and its employees.  More than that, the US Secret Service is often quite open about what it wants to buy and what it has achieved. And right now it wants to award a contract for a sarcasm detector, for use on social networks.

Probably this is a sensible idea - we all know how the likes of the NSA and the UK GCHQ sift through electronic messages for keywords and 'chatter'.  Many of us probably use words and terms that could be misinterpreted as some of the searched for terms in normal usage and possibly some of us use them from time to time in a sarcastic or ironic way, especially if there has been some governmental or agency activity we don't agree with - the mass interception of emails seems to have irritated a few people recently, for example.

So the Secret Service, probably in an attempt to avoid chasing innocent if sarcastic people so they can concentrate of the real bad guys, are looking for a developer to provide a sarcasm detector.  I just hope it can differentiate between US and UK sarcasm. I think it would be ironic if it couldn't.  Or am I just being sarcastic?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here


 
    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

        Follow me on Twitter  - @RayASullivan

        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me