Serendipity35

Marian Croak, a name that may not be familiar to many, has had a profound impact on the way we communicate today. As a renowned American engineer, Croak has spent her career pushing the boundaries of technology, particularly in the realm of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). With over 200 patents to her name, Croak's work has enabled seamless communication over the internet, revolutionizing the way we connect.

Her  U.S. Patent No. 7,599,359 for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Technology was ultimately used to create applications such as Zoom, WhatsApp and many others.

Born on May 14, 1955, in New York City, Croak's interest in technology was sparked by her father, who built her a chemistry set that led to her early exploration of the sciences. She pursued her passion for problem-solving at Princeton University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1977. Later, she received a PhD in Social Psychology and Quantitative Analysis from the University of Southern California.

Croak's career spans three decades at Bell Labs and AT&T, where she worked on digital messaging applications and VoIP technologies. Her team convinced AT&T to adopt the TCP/IP protocol, which allowed for standardized communication over the Internet. Croak's work on VoIP enabled the conversion of voice data into digital signals, making it possible to transmit voice, text, and video over the internet.

Another of Croak's notable achievements is her patent for text-based donations to charity. Developed in response to Hurricane Katrina, this technology allowed users to donate to organizations using text messaging. The technology was widely used after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, raising over $43 million for relief organizations. Croak received the 2013 Thomas Edison Patent Award for this innovation.

Croak's contributions extend beyond her technical expertise. As a leader at AT&T, she managed over 2,000 engineers and computer scientists, overseeing programs that impacted millions of customers. In 2014, she joined Google as Vice President of Engineering, focusing on expanding internet access and developing Responsible AI.

Throughout her career, Croak has received numerous accolades for her work. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2016 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022, becoming one of the first two Black women to receive this honor. She has also been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As Croak herself notes, "Inventors are usually people like you. Sometimes they're good at certain things, other times they're not, and that's ok. Just focus on what you want to change, and you become that change and can make that change happen."

Her legacy serves as a testament to the power of innovation and the impact one person can have on the world. As we continue to navigate the complexities of modern communication, we owe a debt of gratitude to pioneers like Marian Croak, who have worked tirelessly to bring people closer together.

 

In the continuing stories of new AI chatbots, Grammarly, the typing assistant, will release GrammarlyGO. Their AI chatbot can write emails, edit documents, or come up with new ideas.

Unlike their popular proofreading tool, Grammarly (which I regularly use), GrammarlyGO will go beyond pointing out your grammar mistakes because it will "learn your writing style" and write content as you might have on your own. That is the concept.

Grammarly argues this is a way to stop bad writing from "draining business productivity and performance" and that it will eventually generate "highly relevant text with an understanding of personal voice and brand style, context, and intent—saving people and businesses time while accounting for their unique needs."

It will work as their earlier tool within email, social media, and word-processing applications and websites.

Available across the free (in select markets) and paid professional, education, and developer tiers, GrammarlyGO is on by default for individual users, who can toggle it off in their settings. Business and education administrators, meanwhile, must opt-in for their organizations.

MORE  https://www.grammarly.com/blog/grammarlygo-augmented-intelligence/

If you have been using the Internet for the past 25 years, you know how radically it has changed. And yet, no comprehensive regulations have been updated since then.

The news is full of complaints about tech companies getting too big and too powerful. Social media is often the focus of complaints. We often hear that these companies are resistant to changes and regulations, but that is not entirely true. 

On Facebook's site concerning regulations, they say "To keep moving forward, tech companies need standards that hold us all accountable. We support updated regulations on key issues."

Facebook may be at the center of fears and complaints, but they keep growing. Two billion users and growing.

There are four issues that address that they feel need new regulations.

Combating foreign election interference
We support regulations that will set standards around ads transparency and broader rules to help deter foreign actors, including existing US proposals like the Honest Ads Act and Deter Act.

Protecting people’s privacy and data
We support updated privacy regulations that will set more consistent data protection standards that work for everyone.

Enabling safe and easy data portability between platforms
We support regulation that guarantees the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate.

Supporting thoughtful changes to Section 230
We support thoughtful updates to internet laws, including Section 230, to make content moderation systems more transparent and to ensure that tech companies are held accountable for combatting child exploitation, opioid abuse, and other types of illegal activity.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years. Its main goal was stated as allowing "anyone [to] enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The FCC said that they believed the Act had "the potential to change the way we work, live and learn." They were certainly correct in that. But they continued that they expected that it would affect "telephone service -- local and long distance, cable programming and other video services, broadcast services and services provided to schools."

And it did affect those things. But communications went much further and much faster than the government and now they need to play some serious catchup. It is much harder to catch up than it is to keep up. 

 

Technical Writers are often the link between engineers, marketing associates, developers and external users of a product or service.

When I have taught undergraduate classes in technical writing, something I have to address with students right away is their definition of technical writing. In many people's minds, writing that is "technical" is complicated, full of jargon and difficult to read. But in fact, the goal of the technical writer is exactly the opposite. It is usually to make technical subject matter less complicated and easier to understand and use.

In my undergraduate technical writing classes (which are considered advanced writing courses) we combines current theory with actual practice to prepare students as technical writers. They analyze complex communication situations and then design appropriate responses through tasks that involve problem solving, rhetorical theory, document design, oral presentations, writing teams, audience awareness, ethical considerations and ethical issues.

When I teach at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), my students are engineers, computer scientists, architects and scientists who often dislike writing and are used to only academic writing. Unfortunately, much academic writing is students demonstrating their learning to a professor who already knows the subject. In most real technical communication, the writer is the expert and the readers are the learners. In professional life, you may be writing for supervisors, colleagues or customers. You might be explaining a problem, a product, an experiment, or a project, and the format may be a proposal, abstract, report, email or manual.

When I teach technical writing at a more comprehensive university, such as Montclair State University, the students are more comfortable with writing, but less comfortable with the technical part.  That is because they don't think of technical writing as being a part of every field. For education, biology, art, music, and other science and liberal arts students, they need to rethink the technical aspects of their studies. For example, I have had art history majors who wrote technical documentation on art restoration.

My graduate students in professional technical communication are often dealing with social media, documentation, video presentations and a variety of real world tasks. NJIT offers a Technical Communications Certificate that attracts primarily professionals who intend to learn/expand their careers as technical writers, editors, trainers, website designers, and documentation specialists.

I don't know that being a technical writer at Google is typical of that job, but this video gives you a little taste of technical writing and life at Google.