When Charles #Dickens unexpectedly died in 1870, readers felt doubly cheated, not only losing the author, but also the ending of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." But with spiritualism at its height, avid fans decided to take matters into their own hands and consult...his ghost! 👻

In Battleborough, Vermont, in 1872, tramp printer Thomas Power James had a trance in a boarding house seánce. "Charles Dickens" wrote a polite note to James, requesting a 15 Nov. meeting.

Ghost Dickens asked James to write the ending of "Edwin Drood" through "spirit-pen" 👻🖋️
T.P. James kindly did so, with a medium's aid. The result was a completed "Part Second" (1873), which features a "Medium's Preface"!

👻Ghost Dickens claims that injured Edwin Drood is rescued by Durdles, allies with Datchery to expose an insane Jasper, and later marries Rosa 👻
None other than #Sherlock creator Arthur Conan Doyle attended a seánce at which American violinist Florizel von Reuter (who died 1985!) interrogated Ghost Dickens about the lost finale of "Edwin Drood," and was told,

👻"Edwin is alive and Cris[parkle] is hiding him" 👻
In "Twenty Years' Experience as a Ghost Hunter" (1916) Elliott O'Donnell complained that despite the lapse of years, Ghost Dickens 👻 had proliferated rather than subsided, with "foolish and conceited" people naïvely assuming the great late author would wish to contact them!
Though in 1858 #Dickens mocked spiritualism in "The Rapping Spirits" and this HILARIOUS piece, he also wrote many ghost tales himself and attended @GhostClub1862. Likely, he would have satirized but understood the craze to interview his ghostly shade 👻https://t.co/mvqOfqt6PU
Some form of logic may have supported using seánces and other otherworldly means to contact the Ghost of Charles Dickens 👻 in the Age of Spiritualism

After all, if the ghosts of lawyers can return on Christmas Eve to remonstrate, why not famous authors to finish the story?
For more on the reputed activities of Ghost Dickens and theories about "Edwin Drood," read @DrPeteOrford's "The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It" (2018): https://t.co/cCa1WnCmUu
Also, read T.P. James/Ghost Dickens's "Part Second" collaboration here, containing the "Medium's Preface": https://t.co/v5XKoxRUNu
Courtesy of the A.C.D. Encyclopedia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's full account of his "meeting" with Ghost Dickens can be read in "The Edge of the Unknown" (1930), section "VI. The Alleged Posthumous Writings of Known Authors": https://t.co/TxYMJBeqT4
Last, but not least, O'Donnell's text on Ghost Dickens's afterlives, complaining about the arrogance of his spiritualist fans: https://t.co/ryukRs3eDA

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.