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DMLR*Newsletter — Xtra GOLD_61
I. FLAGS.
 I am actually living in the shadow of the past. When I go through the collection of mini flags I piled up during the adolescence, my visual system works with excellent accuracy to grasp the meaning of every image printed on them souvenirs. Where, when, why, how I was doing. What's the core content of everything we collect? The Internet of things.
Five years ago I have been giving up watching TV. That black equipment still stands up the wall covered by a colourful dishcloth the kind you receive as gift from relatives who didn't know exactly which useful object to buy for your... anniversary or birthday. This towel here, hung up on the silent display, remembers a Normandy lighthouse. It was bought by my first cousin in France. It reads "Ouest".
Normandy for me—I have never travelled there, limiting my French transalpine connections to Paris (three times) and Valle de Loire—recalls the D-Day in June 1944. Or the five-time Tour de France winner, Jacques Anquetil, Rsvp. Now it's time to cover my television set by other stuff, I mean the mini flags I had collected for many years from the cities and places I visited during my childhood and over. Each flag, usually 15x25x25cm sized, was a cheap souvenir my parents were disposed to take on for their son, a triangle of fabric printed with flashing names and significant pictures of landmarks, monuments or symbols in order to remember where you had been and the reason why! Many places illustrated this way lie now stored inside a metal box... quite protected from the daylight. They explain the whole journey of a teenage boy, here listed at random:
- a group of four flags from my first trip out of Italy—Monaco, Nice, Cannes, and Côte d'Azur—or a bunch of seven from around the great Italian lakes, Garda and Como, or the foreign tiny states inside the peninsula, i.e. San Marino and Vaticano;
- the souvenirs taken out from European sites showing double-faced images, thus representing the precious part of the collection, even tough some flags don't mean I was with my parents at the time, let's say I wasn't present in Bruxelles (Grand' Place + Manneken Pis), Luxembourg, Amsterdam (Munttoren, Koninklijk Paleis, Q.Z. Kolkje), London/Windsor, Praha, while I was there two times in Austria—Innsbruck, Wien, Salzburg, Stift Melk, Knittelfeld-Zeltweg (F1 car race)—and in Munich of Bavaria;
- my frequent trips alone to Paris, Copenhagen, Hamburg;
- Switzerland has been visible through San Gottardo, Bellinzona, Luzern, Interlaken and Lausanne
- visiting Italy as a kid there are mountains and the sea, the best memories belong to Dolomiti, Val di Fassa, Cervinia-Breuil (the peak of Mt. Cervino hidden under the clouds), Punta Hellbronner (mt. 3462) the highest post I visited until now! And the snow fields where I learned skiing, Fai and Molveno around Trento, or Passo Stelvio and the five mini flags united to celebrate the four passes (Sella, Gardena, Pordoi, Falzarego); Cesenatico and Cattolica as the seaside, finally the cities possessing the most touristic reputation can't be missing and here I would count on flags from Siena, Pisa, San Geminiano (Tuscany), Venice, Padova and Verona (Veneto), Roma, and last but not least the industrial triangle Genova, Milano, Torino.
- Latest trip validated by mini flags? For the record, the summer camp tour of Sicily where grown-up enough I successively stay in Messina, Taormina, Palermo, Agrigento, and Siracusa.
This great collection means I have been fond of geography since I was a young nerd, able to know every nation's flag from one another and consider it the best matter of study for me. I'm thoughtful before the vintage collection. Now all the things should have been catalogued and evaluated by a sovereign intelligence over the Internet. I have only to take a picture of the whole 84-flag lot, post it on eBay and wait for the highest bidder to know its value. No way! I'm expected to keep my memory attentive.
II. QUANTUM OF GU.
The Winter Olympic Games are just over in Milano Cortina. With Ailing Eileen Gu crowned as the Snow Princess. First I had already written about Olympics. But this time I would pay tribute to the freestyle skier, three-time Olympic champion, who made the controversial decision to represent China instead of her native country since the 2022 Beijing Games.
Three golds (and three silvers) in big air, slopestyle and halfpipe made her a global superstar. Gu actually seems to be the product of an AI creative challenge: half American and half Chinese, she has got somewhat originality in common with Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang, founder of Nvidia: after all a GPU contains 'GU'. And she's a woman as successful as Fei-Fei Li, the skilled scientist behind the Image Net project—15 million images classified into 22,000 categories creating a world things catalogue. Global flux from Asia, highly educated men and women, a key factor for new improvements around the Silicon Valley.
A lifestyle based on sport and fashion, all spiced up with eloquent beauty and success, Eileen Gu has hopscotched the world to appear confident at ski competitions as well at catwalks. A great achievement that some politicians would envy for certain—moreover Gu has taken quantum physics at Stanford.
Before her gold medal win the last day of the 2026 Winter Olympics, Gu had gone viral after unveiling a custom outfit inspired by traditional Chinese blue-and-white porcelain.
"The look blended sport and culture, airing a modern athlete's silhouette with design rooted in centuries-old craftmanship. 'China' and 'porcelain' are essentially interchangeable words"... "Gu also added a playful touch to her heritage-inspired look by carrying a Labubu dressed in tiny LV ski gear..."(*)
During several interviews before and after her performance on icy snow, she showed to debate every topic in a personal way-out manner, for example admitting that she spent a lot of time "tinkering" with her thoughts and attributed her strong mental attitude to this belief—"let this be your reminder that neuroplasticity is our super power as humans, and while we can't all be Olympians, we can make one choice today that will bring us closer to the person we want to be" (*). In other words, Eileen Gu has been breaking the Internet with her face card and talents. But if you are not interested in her citizenship status, her free skiing performance, her opinions on a woman's attainments or her fallen victim to cyberbullism... well you might always read Stanford Magazine.
(*) The sentences in Italics on this page are excerpted from Instagram. Now follow www.instagram/eileengu and soon after you will receive into your IG feed a lot of posts and vids from Red Bull or TCL, for she is marketing their brand as global ambassador!
III. OFF LIMITS.
This winter has been the third in a row since I have been never turning on the central heating at home. While the outdoor temperatures started to diminish weightily—it occurred early in November this time—the apartment thermometer follows suit from usual 22°C to 18°C, first step lower, until it stably fixes at 15-16°C during the coldest weeks of the year. That is -7 of thermal difference.
My body response is always kind of adaptation to the new environmental conditions. More calories to feed the body, possibly less movements to do, many sleeping hours to restore. All conditions gear. The usual equipment requires several coats to protect me, that is a number of clothing ranging from 7 to 9, depending of my daily perception of the unpleasant coldness. Here different fabrics may be of help to me, from the old loved wool to the synthetic fibers (Polyamide, Elastane) and modern materials (Thinsulate, DriFit, Memory Foam).
Needless to say, I'm covered even more in bed by four layers of heavy blankets. Almost buried.
I like to face the winter with such a challenge to make me believe I'm such a revenant after three months of a distressing treatment like that.
The funny side of this quarterly experience consists of doubling the food to be prepared and it consequently makes the kitchen steaming up by means of frying pans and boiling pots. Usually the activity of cooking leads to a 1-2°C increase of the inner apartment temperature. Of course wine and liquors support the attempt to survive into the wild. I would show here my appreciation to Grappa Nonino, as distilled from the fermented residue of grapes (www.grappanonino.com).
Meanwhile in Cortina d'Ampezzo, where this year's Olympic skiing events are being held, average February temperatures are already 3.6° warmer than when the city last hosted the games in 1956. Katherine Hayhoe mentioned in her Talking Climate newsletter (talkingclimate.ca) how Winter Olympics both impact and are impacted by climate change. International sports can produce a lot of emissions, and yet people involved in them often make excuses for climate inactions in sports. The future of Winter Games on a warming planet is becoming increasingly uncertain. A study led by the University of Waterloo's Daniel Scott last year found that of the 95 locations that have hosted the Winter Olympics, only 52 are projected to to remain viable in 25 years—and that's under moderate climate change and average conditions. So what? Protect Our Winters! ("POW is a passionate community of enthusiasts, professional athletes and industry brands uniting the outdoor community to advocate for policy solutions to climate change", www.protectourwinters.org.)
Peace!
IV. NVIDIA.
This book should be read in every school, one would choose which grade, but you as parent must try to. The title of the book: "Geopolitics of the Artificial Intelligence" by Alessandro Aresu (Feltrinelli, 2024). That's all you need to expand your mind.
Why AI in marketing? Open AI's Sam Altman said AI will handle 95% of Marketing Work done by Agencies and Creatives, according to the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute (marketingaiinstitute.com)—the book will explain who is that guy and why come his quotes as a bombshell. I would try to explain. Becoming a Next-Gen Marketer means you will use AI to grow your business and career.
Unless you are dedicated to living off the grid, technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives. We're in the apex of innovation.
The leading voices on the application of AI in business are probably robots linked together via the Internet so that their combined power may be harnessed to work on difficult problems—while computer scientists have turned into founders or CEOs of several startups that in a few years would have held the main stage of the global economy. My piece of practical advice suggests to go to the core business of the applied AI, aka Nvidia, starting from its podcast and blog. Real stories, real impact. "Explore how the latest technology are shaping our world, from groundbreaking discoveries to transformative sustainability efforts" (ai-podcast.nvidia.com).
As for blogs.nvidia.com their contents provide a full range of AI applied fields
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/generative-ai
blogs.nvidia.com/blog7category/enterprise
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/auto
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/gaming
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/auto
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/pro-graphics
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/category/robotics
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/tag/healthcare-life-sciences.
The matter in question could be how much will AI cost to us all, financially and environmentally speaking, if one considers the ongoing investments required through public commitments and stock markets by the Big Tech.
All that glitters around AI ain't gold. Bayesian statistics academics warned about the interaction of a decision maker with AI decision support. They wrote that "ML-DS (Machine Learning Decision Support) is sometimes perceived a way to leverage the power of machine learning while retaining human control oversight" (source: arxiv.org/html/2602.21889v1). With their 2-Step Agent framework, they "demonstrate that the introduction of ML-DS can lead to harmful consequences due to a mismatch of the model with the users' expectations or training, even in an ideal scenario where the ML is as good as it gets and the agent is a 'perfect' reasoner".
Maybe we stay where we were fifty years ago, too far from a world in which technological progress and human development would jointly enhance quality of life, as envisioned by the Italian entrepreuner Angelo Dalle Molle, founder of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence named after him (www.idsia.ch). Under the cosidearable strain due to modern life, as long ago as 1970s, we would have recourse to some natural healing—to quote that old advertisement for Cynar alcoholic drink, made from artichoke. But now the boundary between human being and machine, real life and video games, is blurring. The GPUs have changed everything we have been seeing and hearing on our personal devices. And they keep working, day and night.
V. Direct Marketing.
The DIRECT MARKETING glossary is available on DMLR in a 3-document edition (PDF) you can browse here or easily download onto your desktop.
It consists of 19 pages as a whole, 311 paragraphs/terms, 236 Kb, 7450 words, 44772 types!
Select and print the three parts of the glossary in English from PDF::Menu.
Sure the Internet has been changing the traditional snail-mail based direct marketing. And yet the Internet marketing is a consequence of the old direct marketing somehow. Many terms you'll find inside the DM glossary are suiting for the e-mail marketing too... but they come from a business development initiative of Canada Post Corporation [hommage à Connexions --centre de resources en marketing direct].
VI. Linked
Resources.
I became a Wikipedia supporter, the online encyclopaedia written by users. Wikipedia was never meant to be like the rest of the Internet. This place was always meant to be free for everyone to use, without the nuisance of subscriptions or popup ads interfering with our experience. It has now being 25 years and counting since Wikipedia began. Currently the largest multilingual free-content encyclopaedia on the Internet, Wikipedia is written, edited, and fact checked by nearly 250,000 people, all voluteers from around the world. It can often be an excellent source for background on a subject. Donations are on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. If you are in a position to give, you can make a donation to Wikipedia at donate.wikimedia.org.
VII. MyQuiz.
 What does it mean 'Webcast'?
Derived from the combination of the terms 'web' and 'broadcast', a webcast is the transmission of audio and/or video content over the Internet. A webcast uses streaming media technology to take a single content source and distribute it to many simultaneous listeners/viewers. The largest 'webcasters' include existing radio and TV stations who 'simulcast' their output, as well as a multitude of Internet-only 'stations'. The term webcasting is usually reserved for referring to non-interactive linear streams or live events. |
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