Posts

Today’s New York Times had an amazing slate of stories that made it clear that there are worse places to live: China is in the midst of a program to resettle millions of rural peasants to cities where there are no jobs. There are currently an estimated 1,500 epidemics in India. The Times looks closely at the diminished lives of a household of two doctors in Syria since the civil war began. The headline of this story says it all, City in Russia Unable to Kick Asbestos Habit. The International section of the paper is always somewhat grim, but this selection stood out. ...

What does data science look like in practice? You won’t find a better example than Coding in the Rain by my old boss, Jason Davis. The post is a clinic on extracting meaning from a noisy data set.

Journalism prof/media critic Jay Rosen made the most important point yet about Edward Snowden in his post, The Snowden Effect. In it, he describes how Snowden’s disclosures have motivated reporters to dig deeply into secret government programs that violate citizens’ privacy, and not just in America. All over the world people are asking what their governments are up to. Snowden’s specific disclosures aside, we’ve learned a ton about how governments collect data about us thanks to the Snowden Effect that Rosen describes. Had Glenn Greenwald not reported on Snowden’s leak, none of this would be happening. This effect alone (which is generalizable to many whistle blowers) makes whistle blowing hugely important. ...

This week we lost two people that are much on my mind. The first is Douglas Engelbart, one of the great visionaries in the history of the computer industry. You can read the New York Times obituary, but my favorite piece on Engelbart’s impact was by Bret Victor. Engelbart was, of course, one of the fathers of the Silicon Valley as we know it today. As the obituary mentions, with regard to “The Mother of All Demos,” given by Engelbart in 1968: ...

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an amazing post today, musing on the dynamics of power and ways that powerlessness is exhibited. He distills the post to a single sentence in the comment section: My point is we often mistake the display of power for a display of morality. Read the whole thing.

But there is a major problem with evaluating information labeled “secret”: people tend to inflate the value of “secret” information simply because it is secret. In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, neuroscience researchers Leaf Van Boven and Charles M. Judd talk about research into people’s willingness to trust secret information simply because it is secret. I assume that one day we’ll have to add some sort of secrecy bias to the list of cognitive biases. ...

persistent.info: Getting ALL your data out of Google Reader Google Reader dies this weekend. Mihai Parparita, a former member of the Google Reader team, has created a tool to extract all your data from it. You should definitely look into the alternatives. I am using NewsBlur.

Lately I’ve been thinking about exercise, mainly because I’ve been experimenting with Crossfit. Too much has been written about the good and bad of Crossfit, this isn’t one of those posts. What I’m interested in is some of the exercises people do at Crossfit, and how they make me think about how we use our bodies to do work. Crossfit emphasizes Olympic weight lifts – the clean and jerk and the snatch. They’re both techniques for getting weight from the ground to over your head. With the clean and jerk you do it in two movements, the snatch involves one continuous movement. Both require a large amount of skill, and even people who have been doing them for awhile tend to be pretty terrible at it. ...

The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state. Andrew Leonard writes about the interaction of open source, private industry, and government intelligence agencies in Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together. I think the piece is perhaps a bit too negative, I’ll try to follow up on that later. ...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his experience of teaching a writing class at MIT this semester. Here he is talking about motivating students: I didn’t have to work hard to motivate people. What I found was that if I showed up, and I was excited, they fed off of that, and they got excited. I came to feel that teaching was performance. My job was to communicate my own energy and belief in the importance of the work. ...