REVIEW – Look at my fancy coffee maker! The PINKAH Stainless Steel French Press Coffee Maker is a contemporary take on the French Press design that features an innovative leakproof pouring mechanism and a double-walled design that keeps your beverages hot for hours. We love all the coffee things, so let’s learn more. To the […]

Alt text: a stylish woman in a coat, who is emphatically neither an elephant nor a bear. Not everyone is.

Delighted that my THE DOWNLOADED is the #1 Science Fiction bestseller on the Audible.com monthly bestsellers list as reported in the March 2024 issue of Locus, the trade journal for the science fiction and fantasy fields, which came out today. Get THE DOWNLOADED here: Canada: https://adbl.co/45WsEqI US: https://adbl.co/49kuCEc UK: https://adbl.co/3tUfJbJ

National Geographic’s Maps Division and Center for Sustainable Destinations teamed up to produce the first NG-developed Online Geotourism MapGuide to support sustainable tourism across the Greater Yellowstone region of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

The site, http://www.yellowstonegeotourism.org/, which launched on March 31st, is open to anyone to discover and share information about unique features, tours, and businesses that best represent and sustain the natural and cultural character of the region. Visitors can also request a free print MapGuide.

Geotourism is the kind of travel that sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place — its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents. Online Geotourism MapGuides are web versions of the print maps that National Geographic has developed for a number of regions around the world, including Crown of the Continent, Baja California, and Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to name a few.

In addition to producing print and/or web maps, these projects bring together diverse representatives from the local communities to collectively define what makes their region special and how best to communicate it to the rest of the world. NG Maps is excited to participate in these projects that help travelers and local communities discover and preserve special places around the world. Anyone interested in developing a Geotourism MapGuide for their region, or simply becoming a “Geotraveler” should visit http://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/sustainable/.

An objection that is increasingly encountered by fund-raisers is the dreaded "I only give online" response. As with any objection, it seems insurmountable and absolute to those fund-raisers who don't know how to handle it. The good news this objection is by no means insurmountable.

The internet is quick and easy. The internet doesn't ask donors to drop what they're doing and give right now. Raising money by direct mail in a world that doesn't the obvious perceived advantage to of internet giving for donors into account, is a strategy that can only produce diminishing returns.

As with any objection, donors often use this one not out of reluctance to support a charity. Fund-raisers learn to hear "the objection behind the objection" and provide solutions to the problems a donor has with giving to a campaign.

Here then, are a few strategies to over come the overcome this increasingly common objections.

Giving online isn't a "no" its an absolute yes. The best part of hearing the giving online objection is that a fund-raiser can be sure that they are speaking with a qualified prospect. A second ask at this time is critical, be prepared for this response and to reply with something that may overcome it.

People forget.

• Let your donor know that giving over the phone today is a sure way to get the donation over and done with.

Are there any special incentives that your telephone campaign is offering that my not be available if a donor gives online?

• A Matching Fund,
• A Member Card,
• Perhaps a discount on the membership itself.

As calmly as possible, people can sense your mood over the phone line, inform the donor that you'll be able to take care of their donation right now by phone in 1 minute or less.

• People prefer to give online because they don't have time to do it by phone.
• At least they imagine that they don't.
• Being prepared with this response and delivering on your promise to be brief can in fact increase a donor's respect for you and the organization you are calling for.
• One of the most beneficial things you can say to a prospect is that you respect their time and will be brief with it.

• Is it a security issue? Many donors prefer the internet alternative for the sake of protecting their information.
  
• Let the donor know that your call center and credit card processor are secure. If they aren't, work for another company.
• Know your security processes and repeat them to the donor.
• Donors are protected by state and federal laws; tell them this.
  

How about the absolute truth?

• Tell the donor you've reached that your working with a team of fund-raisers and that giving to you, today by phone would not only support their cause; it would be a sign of support for all the hardworking fund-raisers on your team (this works!)
• Be frank, not rude; donors like being talked to, not talked at or talked over.

Think fast.

• A donor can hear the wheels turning in your head.
• Professional fund-raisers should know the answers to common objections before they arise.

Is your pitch any good?

• If you're coming across an unusual amount of objections, listen to yourself.
• Tweak your words. You already know what doesn't work right? Try something else.

These are only a handful of the possible responses to this objection. Creative fund-raisers will develop far more.

The only possible outcome of not clearly presenting a counter to an objection is failing to secure a pledge. Donors realize for the most part that its a fund-raiser's job to ask. So Ask.

The short answer to this question is, yes. While the rules have changed a bit since the early days of raising money online, the necessary elements all still exist in great supply. These are; a large and motivated donor pool, innovative organizations and fundraisers and the technology that brings it all together. This post will cover this complex topic with updates to come. In the mean time, voice your opinion on the relevancy of online fundraising in the comments section below.

The first step to success in online fundraising is the cause. While its possible to raise money for just about anything, what really promotes success is having a well defined mission statement. This is something that resonates with donors quickly. The shorter it takes to express your mission statement, the more likely it is that donors will stick around to learn more about your organization and its needs. This does not necessarily mean that they'll make a contribution, but donors who leave your site out of boredom, frustration or confusion certainly wont be making any.

After a well defined cause, presentation is the next most important element of online fundraising. Donors are quick to leave sites that are'nt easy to navigate. Ideally donors should be able to make an online gift in just one or two steps, the more complicated a donation system is, the less likely donations are to be made. Simple. modern interfaces are the key to increasing online donations.

In recent weeks and months, we've been having many posts and comments about Taiwanese language.  Today's post is quite different:  it's all about the difference between Mandarin as spoken on the mainland and as spoken on Taiwan. "Words of Influence: PRC terms and Taiwanese identity", by Karen Huang, Taiwan Insight (8 November 2024) What is […]

Hello again,

This month I've been plugging away on the project I mentioned in the previous post which involves among other things a PDF generator and now an implementation of ML (as in Standard ML, but also the other one). This is probably the 10th "compiler" I've written in my life, and it's kind of fun to revisit these problems that you've done many times and try out different approaches, although this time one of the approaches is "Use C++" (for reasons of making good on a joke, but also for reasons of mlton doesn't work on my computer any more). And although C++ is a fine tool for many applications, it does have some deficiencies for the task of writing a compiler (one of the most irritating: a very modest limit on the stack depth? Like my computer has 256 Gigabytes of RAM and 2^64 virtual addresses and somehow it can only manage 1 megabyte for the stack and there's no standard way to increase it? Get off my lawn). But then you can also experience new ways of struggling with C++, like: A middle of the night power failure wrecked my computer's GPT (as in GUID Partition Table, but also the other one) and I was deep in the depths of taking the computer apart to reset its parts, its BIOS (its Basic In/Out System, which is where it stores its biography) and its hard drives were everywhere on the floor, and it could not be saved, and this after I already broke my computer this year by trying to put the world's biggest video card in it, too hard. And I could not merely perform recovery because of Unknown Error, so I had to begin anew again and restore from backups. But when you restore from backup and you're in the mood of "why is this so complicated and I don't understand how computers work any more?" it occurs to you (me) to also change your underlying development environment instead of reinstalling the devil you know. So I ended my friendship with Cygwin64 and switched to new best friend MSYS2. Both of these things are different ways of wishing that you were using Linux while you're using Windows. The main reason I tried this new way of struggling is that Cygwin is very behind on its version of x86_64 clang (C++ compiler), which I wanted to try because it supports AddressSanitizer and clangd on Windows, and I wanted to give LSP in emacs a shot (it's finally good!). There were a few growing pains, but I think MSYS2 is what I would recommend now. One of the nice things they did was create multiple different environments depending on what you want to do (e.g. "I want to use clang to compile x86_64 code" or "I want to do 32-bit cross compilation for ARM") and in that environment, you just say "g++" and it invokes the compiler you want, instead of the weird contortions I've been doing for years with manually invoking x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++. I was also able to get clblast working before being too filled with rage to continue, so that is nice for the ML inference on the world's biggest graphics card. I made these graphics to help me tune the correct settings of GPU layers (y axis) and number of threads (x axis):

tune-single
tune-batch

In some sense the results are obvious (more threads and more layers is faster) but it was interesting to me how the cliff of performance drops off at a different number of layers for single and batch mode (I guess because the batch needs some memory itself?) and how it's clearly better to use fewer threads than cores for batch as well. I was not surprised to see performance drop off for >32 threads (everybody knows that hyper-threads kinda suck) but I was very surprised to see performance pick up again when it gets back up to 64? And only for single mode? I wish I understood that better. But mostly I'm a sucker for the custom visualizations.

Right but when writing this compiler I realized that I wanted to use some Greek letters, and I can't handle it when some characters are in a different font in my source code, so I finally made some space for those in my programming font FixederSys. These certainly still need some tweaks, but it's already better than just being in some other weird font:


{{{caption}}}

You can also see that I have been adding some "useful" emoji at the top. It is an interesting puzzle to try to make these things recognizable (especially for the 1x version, whose charboxes are 8x16 pixels). I am pretty sure I will not try to do all of the emoji (like, the flags are totally hopeless at 8x16), but it is tempting to round out the Unicode support somewhat. Like I was trying to make a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ today and had to settle for ~\_( :) )_/~ which is pretty much (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻.

Also: Adam revived our old game jam game Headcat, which I described in post 927, now over 16 years ago. You can play it online at Headcat.org. It is harder than I remember, perhaps explaining why it did not reach #1 on the One Appstore Per Child charts.

Also: I started and finished (true ending, but just with one character) Slay the Spire. Good game, but you don't need me to tell you that. Same for Alwa's Legacy, which is the sequel to Alwa's Awakening. Both of these are very true-to-form "8-bit" and "16-bit" platformers that I enjoyed and would recommend for genre fans, though I did not try to 100% them. The graphics are the highlight and I thought it was very cute how these could easily have been a pair of games from the NES and SNES. The good old days. And speaking of good-old days, I am now playing Katamari Damacy, which I had played at a friend's house many years ago, and always wanted to spend more time with. It totally holds up (aside from stuff like: You have to play through the tutorial and first level before you can access the menus at all, like to make the game fullscreen?) and it's honestly inspiring how unhinged the game design and writing are, and how fun it manages to be. What an accomplishment!

China is in the early stages of planning a huge space observatory to help answer the matter of whether we are alone in the galaxy.

Who owns Greenland rsquo s island



View Comic!

Full Article