Australia. Parliament. Senate. Economics Legislation Committee, author

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Economics Legislation Committee, author, issuing body

Sesil, James C., author

Horibe, Frances

Vance, J. D., author

Australia. Parliament. Senate. Community Affairs Legislation Committee, author, issuing body

Dewey Library - GE190.I73 W45 2019

Barker Library - GB459.4.R86 2018

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Hayden Library - PQ1278.F35 2016

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Join the Manuscript Division for a focused research orientation to resources located in the Manuscript Reading Room. Learn how to find materials for your research projects and how to utilize the Manuscript Reading Room’s resources in-person and remotely. The session includes general information on conducting research in the Manuscript Reading Room and time for Q&A about research strategies or steps on specific research projects. All researchers are welcome.

 Date: Saturday, November 16, 2019, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST

 Location: Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Room LJ-139B

 Click here for more information and to register.

 Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Click here for more information.

In this session, Manuscript Reference Librarian Edith Sandler will demonstrate how to search for and access personal papers and organizational records documenting the history of the civil rights movement in the 20th century. Time will be included at the end of the session for Q&A about research strategies or steps on specific research projects. All researchers are welcome.

Please note that the maximum class size is 30 researchers unless otherwise indicated.

Individuals requiring accommodations for any of these events are requested to submit a request at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 minutes prior to the orientation. Seating is available on a first-come basis. Registration does not guarantee entry after the orientation start time.

For more information, please visit: https://www.loc.gov/rr/main/satorient/

Date: Saturday, January 25, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM EST

Location: Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Room LJ-139B

Click here for more information and to register.

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Click here for more information.

Join Manuscript Reference Librarian Lara Szypszak for a focused orientation to resources located in the Manuscript Reading Room. This session will share the letters of love from members of congress to their spouses, writers to their paramours, artists to their muses, and more. Celebrate Valentine’s Day (better late than never) with notes of romance found in the Manuscript Division’s collections, and also learn how to find materials for your research projects utilizing the Manuscript Reading Room’s resources in-person and remotely. The session includes general information on conducting research in the Manuscript Reading Room and time for Q&A about research strategies or steps on specific research projects. All researchers are welcome. See the following link for Maps and Floor Plans in the Jefferson Building: https://www.loc.gov/visit/maps-and-floor-plans/thomas-jefferson-building/first-floor/

Date: Saturday, February 15, 10:00 am - 11:30 am EST

Location: Library of Congress Jefferson Building, Room 139B

Click here for more information and to register.

Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or email ADA@loc.gov.

Click here for more information.

This video depicts how a program improvement approach—known as Rapid-Cycle Evaluation—can provide administrators with evidence about what works to improve services.

While many of us try to cope with the immediate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and process the trauma, anxiety, and global loss, recent research might help guide the way forward.

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The U.K.s new special cyber operations unit, 6 Division (6 Div), will move beyond the typical cyber capabilities within the military sphere into full-blown social media "information warfare." And here the primary adversary is Russia, which has turned the dark art of peddling fake news and political propaganda across major social media platforms into a national security strategy.

Much of the work of the new unit will be relatively traditional signals activities—jamming and intercepting enemy comms, supporting the field world of allied intelligence agencies.

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Social media continues to surge as a channel for businesses to market themselves and engage with customers. And with its continued growth and popularity, there is no shortage of social media “how-to” advice out there directed at businesses trying to scale up.

If you make it a point to keep up with social media trends, you’ve likely found at least some overlap in these tips—but every so often, there are unconventional or uncommon practices that can lead to great results. As experts in social media marketing, the members of Young Entrepreneur Council shared their most surprising social media tips—that truly work—and how you can take advantage for your business.

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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. If you’re a smart marketer, you have been using the these top social media giants to share your content, promote your products and services and grow your business. But rival platforms are being created all the time, and while many of them don’t reach the same heights of success, a handful could give mega-popular platforms a run for their money. Moreover, if you’re an early adopter of up-and-coming alternatives, your company could reap the biggest benefits.

If you want to be ahead of the curve, keep your eye on the following five social media platforms to watch.

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How have the rise of social media and spread of misinformation changed the news media landscape?

As a major election year nears and the public questions the role of Facebook in combating misinformation, Andrew Pergam, director of governance and strategic initiatives at Facebook, gave a glimpse of what is happening behind the scenes at the social media company during a symposium at the University of Utah on Friday.

Misinformation is one of the companys most pressing and scrutinized issues, he said. We are under an immense amount of pressure to do more to tackle viral information more quickly.

complete article

MEDIA PhonCD F G3701.C6.G533

CT interviews Stephen Rasche on Erbil’s Catholic presence, the need for Christian unity, and why Christians will “no longer be shy” with the gospel.

For 25 years, Stephen Rasche was a “bare knuckles” international lawyer. But in 2010, he offered his services to the Chaldean Catholic Church of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and has increasingly dedicated his life to the preservation of this ancient community.

Under the leadership of Archbishop Bashar Matti Warda, in 2015 Rasche helped found the Catholic University of Erbil, where he serves as vice chancellor. Also the director of its Institute for Ancient and Threatened Christianity, Rasche lived this title as ISIS ravaged Iraq’s Christian homelands in the Nineveh Plains and many believers fled to Erbil.

After testifying on their behalf before the United Nations and the US Congress, Rasche allows them to represent themselves in his recent book, The Disappearing People: The Tragic Fate of Christians in the Middle East. The book has won a diverse range of endorsements, from leaders such as Matthew Hassan Kukah, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Nigeria; Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Muslim organization in the world; and Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute.

The US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom reports that less than 250,000 Christians are living in Iraq, most in Kurdistan or on the Nineveh Plains. Two-thirds belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church.

CT interviewed Rasche about the logic of establishing a university during a genocide, how its Catholic identity functions in a Muslim society, and his enduring optimism for Christianity in Iraq.

What led you personally to invest your life in this endeavor?

In 2010, Bishop Warda had just been made archbishop, and I went to pay him a visit of respect, asking if there ...

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Browsery E302.6.R85 F75 2018

Browsery TX643.W37 2019

Browsery PS3610.E46 A6 2018

Browsery HM1271.C4833 2017

Browsery QE523.T285 B4413 2019

Browsery HQ1237.C745 2019

To the surprise of exactly no one, we cancelled CSS Day 2020, originally slated for 11th and 12th of June. In this post I’d like to explain our reasoning, and call for a gesture of solidarity and support to small, independent conference organisers.

All CSS Day attendees received a mail with details about the reimbursement process. If you did not receive it we do not have your correct email address on file, and you should contact us.

Being a good attendee

If you want the independent web conference community to continue to exist in the future, there are a few things you can do for your friendly local conference organiser.

1. Make sure they can reach you. Check your email address in their sales system.
2. If the conference offers the option, and if you can afford it at all, allow them to move your ticket forward to the next edition. This will give them some financial breathing room. See it as an interest-free loan aimed at preserving the ecosystem all of us built.
3. Be understanding of delays and uncertainties. All conference organisers must chart their own course, and some will be taking a wait-and-see approach, especially if their conferences are scheduled for late June or beyond.
4. If conferences do run, be accepting of a sharply diminished experience. It is very likely that conferences sell way fewer tickets than usual, and the most obvious way of saving money is removing luxury items such as nice extra catering options, afterparties with free drinks, diversity tickets, captioning, possbily even wifi. Speakers may be asked to waive their speaking fee. The entire conference might be moved online. Be accepting of such occurrences, and remember that they’re aimed at allowing the organisers to support themselves and their families.

A good example of the last point is the perfmatters conference over in the US. It switched to an online conference, but offered no refunds for the sharp decline in experience because the money was already spent. As a partial recompense, all attendees were allowed to invite someone else to the online conference.

I fully support Estelle in this difficult decision, but at the same time I’m glad I don’t have to do the same.

More in general, the question is whether we want the independent web conference community to survive. (I do, but I’m biased.) If we stick together, and attendees are accepting of cancellations, sharp service level declines, and possibly even loss of money, we might survive.

If we don’t, in a few years we’ll only have corporate conferences with a corporate agenda to attend.

Your choice.

Being a good sponsor

As a sponsor, there are also a few things you can do:

1. If you can afford it, and the sum is not too large, allow cancelled conferences to retain your sponsorship money, possibly as a down payment for a sponsorship next year.
2. Be accepting of point 4 above. If you had earmarked your sponsorship for a specific purpose, be prepared to waive that purpose.
3. That last point will likely remain true for the next year. Please do not earmark future sponsorships, but allow the organiser to spend it as they see fit — and that includes avoiding personal bankruptcy.

Conference finances

Just so you understand my perspective: with one stroke I lost 1/3rd of my annual income. The situation is dire, though fortunately not hopeless. Other conference organisers are hit even harder.

The real question for me personally is whether performance.now(2020), 12th anf 13th of November, will run. Right now we think it will, but if it doesn’t I lose another third of my annual income and I have a real problem.

CSS Day was still far removed from the break-even point. That was completely expected at this time of the year, and even ten days ago we didn’t worry about it. Now, however, we must work with a scenario where we will not sell any more tickets, and where some current ticket holders will ask for a reimbursement. Thus, the financial risk of running the conference has gone from fairly low to enormous. This informs all decisions we took.

A small, independent web conference of our type breaks even when about 60-75% of the tickets are sold. Any number below 60% means that the organisers will have to pay money out of their own pocket.

We try to keep prices relatively restrained, that’s why the break-even point is so high. Huge corporate IT conferences have quite different break-even points, especially if they use the sponsor money to actually pay for the conference and put the complete proceedings of the ticket sales in their own pockets.

June cancelled

It is possible that the de-facto travel ban will be rescinded by early June. The big question is when exactly that will happen. Even if we are absurdly positive and say that we’ll be out of the woods by late April or early May, people will still be understandably concerned about their health, and will not be amenable to booking a trip for the next month.

That means that, in practice, even in a fairy-tale positve scenario we will sell way fewer tickets than last year. It is quite likely we will stay below the magical 65% line that breaks us even. Remember: every single cent we’d pay would come from our own pocket, since we’re going to reimburse the tickets and lose that money. The risk is simply too big, and we decline to run it. The organisers of the XOXO festival explain this problem more clearly than I can.

An added benefit is that we have not yet made any large payments to the venue and the hotel, and if we cancel now we won’t have to. Our suppliers are understanding of the situation, and it appears that the only costs we have to pay is a single speaker flight. That’s manageable.

Online conference? Nope

So: no physical conference in June. But what about an online conference or a postponed one?

Moving conferences online is frequently suggested on Twitter — mostly by people who have no experience in organising conferences. Sure we could try to do that, but there are considerable downsides:

1. Will our audience buy tickets for an online-only conference? Our mailing lists and past audience have self-selected for a desire to attend a physical conference, where not only the talks, but also the social gatherings in the hallways are very important. Some people don’t like that, but our audience very much does.
2. The ticket price would have to be significantly lower than for a physical conference. Of course, the costs would also be significantly lower, but a much lower ticket price still means much less profit per ticket. Financially, it might work. Then again, it might not. We just don’t know.
3. What about our current ticekt holders? Our ticketing system allows us to reimburse them (and we will do so), but it has no option to partially reimburse the tickets of those attendees who’d like to switch to the online conference. We’d have to go through a manual process of invoicing and reimbursing that is likely to take a LOT of time.
4. Then we’d have to find suitable software for online conferences. No doubt there are quite a few good options, but since we have no experience it would take us a long time to pick one.
5. The biggest problem with online conferencing software is that we cannot test it. If something goes wrong on the conference day itself, we essentially do not know what to do, attendees become dissatisfied, and our brand suffers. People might even ask for a reimbursement — and we can’t even tell them they’re wrong.
6. The massive uncertainty that comes with the software will have caused us to live in a state of ultra-stress for weeks, and that is not conducive to reasoning and clarity of thought.
7. Finally, all of this would take a lot of extra time that we cannot spend on other jobs. Although it’s possible we would make some money, it’s also possible that we won’t. The risk is too high.

So our huge time investment and stress load might not actually pay out, and I personally might still be left with a gaping hole of about 1/3rd of my annual income after spending way too many weeks on a solution that didn’t work, left everyone dissatisfied, and precluded me from doing other work while stressing me out so much that I have to take a few weeks’ break without having any money.

I will not go that route. The risk is too high.

Postponing? Nah

Postponing the conference is a more realistic approach. But to which dates? The venue was kind enough to offer us early September dates, but we doubt those are going to work.

Same problem as always: will people buy tickets? They might, but they might not. The risk is too high.

There are additional risks, as Niels Leenheer, who was recently forced to cancel the Fronteers 2020 conference, outlines in a recent article. If many conferences move to fall dates, they will compete not only with one another, but also with the regularly-scheduled conferences that would take place in fall anyway. It’s a lose-lose scenario for everyone.

Part of conference organising is the careful planning of the date. You do not want to be too close to similar conferences, and you’re bound to conference season anyway, which stretches from early March to late June and then from mid September to early December — at least in Europe.

Moreover, once you have a time slot that you have used for several years in a row, your attendees — and your competitors — adjust to that. Changing it is something not to be considered lightly, and will affect not only your own conference, but also other ones planned around the new dates. Solidarity requires us to stay away from the time slots of other independent web conferences.

Also, speakers may have other obligations by that time, or they might still decline to come due to health concerns. All this is entirely understandable, and while we have built up a great network of supportive former speakers who would probably be willing to help us out, it wouldn’t be the conference our attendees bought a ticket for. Besides, it would mean repeating speakers year over year, something we generally try to avoid.

Finally, this would cost us some extra time, though not nearly as much as moving the conference online. Is it the wisest course of action to spend that extra time on postponing the conference instead of looking for other jobs? I don’t think so.

The risk is too high. It’s far better to write off CSS Day 2020 entirely and use the freed-up time to make money in other ways.

***

So that’ where we stand right now. The independent web conference community is taking a severe hit, and we are no exception. Still, we aim to return.

There’s one silver lining: when all this is over there will be pent-up demand for conferences. Plenty of people enjoy going to them, and while skipping one is not a great hardship, skipping an entire conference season might be. So with a little bit of luck our conferences might return to normal in 2021.

If we stick together and show some solidarity we can survive this.

Stay healthy,

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Dewey Library - QA252.5.I85 2019

Here's a selection of Business Standard Opinion pieces for the day