 To bring his stuff to the hospital.
10. What item in Chapter 8 does Augusten think Rick has placed in his office?
(a) A party supplies catalogue.
(b) A large bottle of Valium.
(c) A large vodka ad.
(d) A bottle of gin.
11. How close to taking a drink does Hayden get in Chapter 9?
(a) He nearly walked into a bar.
(b) He bought a pint of vodka.
(c) He bought a bottle of mouthwash.
(d) He ordered one at a bar.
12. How long does Augusten drink before going to Pighead's wake?
(a) 2 hours.
(b) 12 hours.
(c) 30 hours.
(d) 24 hours.
13. What did Hayden do instead of drinking in Chapter 9?
(a) He called his sponsor.
(b) He sat in a park.
(c) He went to a meeting.
(d) He went to sleep.
14. Why does an actress pass out on the commercial set?
(a) She overheats in her costume.
(b) She is high.
(c) She has an eating disorder.
(d) She is underslept.
15. Whom does Augusten think of in Chapter 7, as he watches Foster on the phone?
(a) Neil Bookman.
(b) Jim.
(c) His father.
(d) Hayden.
Short Answer Questions
1. What happens in Chapter 14 that makes Augusten decide to return to rehab?
2. What bad news does Hayden Call with in Chapter 2?
3. What does Augusten do after talking to Pighead's brother on the phone in Chapter 13?
4. In Chapter 14, why is Augusten amazed by the crack addicts he meets?
5. What happens when Augusten confronts Foster at the end of Chapter 8?We’re honored and excited to be named one of the 10 hottest AI IoT startups, as reported in Network World magazine. The award validates our AI-driven approach to manufacturing analytics, and builds on our past recognition as one of Fortune’s 50 leading AI companies and CB Insights’ top 100 AI startups.
AI is clearly all the rage these days. It’s on everyone’s lips: venture capitalists, industry analysts, and mainstream media alike. Gartner pegs the AI market at $1.2 trillion this year and forecasts it to triple to $3.9 trillion by 2022. These are dizzying numbers, and we’re happy to be on the crest of this technology wave.
So by all means, pass the champagne around. Yet in passing, let’s note that dizzying hype is also what technology bubbles are made of. And we know what happens to bubbles when there’s nothing of substance inside.
Think back to the dot.com phenomenon of the early 2000s and the cornucopia of companies that bubbled up from seemingly nowhere. Most fizzled out almost as fast, because when you scratched below the surface, what they had wasn’t real, or its value was questionable, or it couldn’t be monetized. Or all three.
On the other hand, a basket of winning companies did in fact harness the Internet to do great things and create tremendous value for everyone. Google revolutionized and monetized search. Amazon transformed online shopping from risky business to daily routine. Startups like Priceline.com and Shutterfly went on to establish long-lasting businesses.
The lesson here for AI? Real business value is what differentiates the wheat from the chaff.
Beyond the Hype, What’s Under the Hood?
As in the early days of the Internet, some companies have hitched their wagon to today’s brightest technology star — magically appending AI to their brands without adding anything new to their products. That’s why it’s so vital to look under the hood. As with each of the other Top Ten AI companies, Sight Machine passes this test with flying colors.
Yet, we never set out to be an AI company. We got there in pursuit of the mission we’ve always followed: help manufacturers use data to solve productivity and quality challenges across the enterprise. Factory floor data comes in more varieties and quantities than anywhere else. But it’s not useful unless it’s collected, contextualized, and modeled to digitally “mirror” the entire production process. That’s an enormous and complex challenge, and conventional or manual techniques have not been effective at scale.
But AI is uniquely suited for the job — so that’s where we are headed. Frankly, if we could have met the need with an abacus or a T-square, we would have used that instead! AI was never our pre-set goal or destination. It just happens to be the ideal tool for what we were already working on.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, GE, Fujitsu, and Westrock don’t use and partner with Sight Machine because we’re AI. They chose us because we help solve problems on the shop floor, at scale. How? We make all their IoT and manufacturing data useful in real-time, so they can make better, faster decisions.
That’s the secret to our success! We’ve garnered three awards in the past year not for being the most sophisticated AI on the planet, but because we have the most pragmatic and effective use of AI in manufacturing. And you know what? If a technology comes along tomorrow that’s better than AI, we’ll use that.
Don’t get us wrong: AI is at the heart of what we do, we’re very good at it, and we’re grateful to be in the limelight. We just want to remind everyone to buy us for the right reasons. Not for the buzz, but for how effectively we address the challenges manufacturers are trying to solve. To see AI in action on the factory floor, read more here.
The.
FLOOD’s weekly Pop Culture Cure offers an antidote—or five—to the most upsetting developments of the past week. (Because therapy’s expensive, and entertainment’s not.)
Vladimir Putin is the brutal Russian dictator who never met a sickly orange animal he didn’t love to coddle; Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee who never met a callous dictator he didn’t love to woo. And so the two came, inevitably, together. They are bad, they are buddies, and they are too geopolitically worrying to offer much in the way of entertainment. That said, the bad buddy model is a good one, and we shouldn’t throw the bad-babies out with the bad-bathwater. So here’s a list of diabolical friendships that have the power to entertain rather than terrify.
Darth Vader and The Emperor, Star Wars
George Lucas, man. What a joke…and yet, what a genius. There’s no way to summarize that scene above with any kind of objectivity and not sound a lot like Sarah Gailey did here (a lot like, but not like like, because she obviously did it best). This scene has everything: Lord Space Voldemort, a turtle in a hoodie, swords-but-not-swords, Grecian themes, biblical power struggles, and more Catholic imagery than you can shake a cardinal at. AND YET. Darth Vader breathes rad. The Emperor looks rad. And together they live right at the boundary-line of cultural theft and D&D Imagineering—in an uncanny valley between real originality and utter derivation that winds up being effectively creepy. And that is to the good.
(Conclusion: Just because it’s stolen doesn’t mean it can’t slay you.)
Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, Heavenly Creatures
Before Peter Jackson was Master of Hobbitses and Kinger of Kongs, he was the director of exquisitely crafted genre works that, with, Heavenly Creatures, took an odd turn toward the real (but not too real). Heavenly Creatures features two young women who are bored by their surroundings but not limited by them, and who seek to imagine (oh, and murder) their way out. They make their own kind of sense, and it all looks incredible enough, and it also features two very not bad actors in Kate Winslet and (Togetherness’s) Melanie Lynskey, and it’s worth checking out. (PS: Jackson’s not the only director who made his legacy within an epic mode but who made real art outside of it too.)
“Satan Before the Lord,” by Corrado Giaquinto circa 1750
Satan and God, “The Book of Job”
So in terms of Bad Boy dream team couples the top three has to include: (1) Will Smith (a.k.a. “The Fresh Prince”) and Martin Lawrence (a.k.a. “Martin”), (2) Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. “The Notorious B.I.G.”) and Sean “Puffy” Combs (a.k.a. “P. Diddy”), and (3) God (a.k.a. Yahweh) and his nemesis—THE NEMESIS—the Devil himself (a.k.a. Lucifer, a.k.a. many other things). They’ve always had a cold war kind of relationship going on, but things were never hotter than they were