Claus.dahl

1. The Shape of Things (Tom Coates) -- In fact it’s this problem of what’s most intuitive that gives me most pause for tangible computing generally. The assumption from many of these thinkers is that making an interface that’s physical makes it inherently more intuitive. But I don’t buy that physical affordances alone will make it immediately obvious what a smart connected object is for. Sure, you pick up a hammer and you immediately want to hit something (or maybe that’s just me) — but is that true of a smart hammer?
2. Improving the Peer Review Process: A Proposed Market System (PDF) -- We thus suggest a more efficient and integrity-preserving system based on an open two-sided market in which buyers and sellers of peer review services would both be subject to a set of recursive quality indicators. We lay out key features we think would be important to reduce the opportunities for gaming and that improve the signals about the societal value of a contribution. Cool story bro, but until academics are rewarded financially/professionally for publishing in a Better System, most will accept/route-around the current system.
3. Are Engineers Designing Their Robotic Replacements? -- yes, and that's the exciting part of software engineering right now.
4. Metaphors of Data, a Reading List -- The goal in assembling this list was to catalog resources that are helpful in unpacking and critiquing different metaphors, ranging from the hype around data as the new oil to less common (and perhaps more curious) formulations, such as data as sweat or toxic waste.

Four Short Links is moving — On 5/9/16, new editions of Nat's Four Short Links will be published at oreilly.com/ideas and oreilly.com/topics/four-short-links. The new RSS feed is available here. The existing RSS feed will soon redirect to this new feed. Please send questions or concerns to onlinecap@oreilly.com.

Da Prince, præcis 12 år før sin død, udgav Musicology - farvede jeg bloggen her lilla i en måned bare af begejstring. Jeg kunne såmænd have fundet på det samme i torsdags.

Musicology var det første sådan rigtig gode Prince-album i lange tider; bedre end Lovesymbol-albummet 12 år tidligere, der også var en slags comeback efter nogle svage albums. Prince var den 4. mest funky person, der nogensinde har gået på jordkloden, hvis du spørger mig, men livet som Prince-fan var fuldt af skuffelser; for produktionen har været ufattelig ujævn siden de gyldne år fra Dirty Mind i 1980 til Sign Of The Times i 1987. Og selv på de gyldne plader må man leve med, at Prince ved siden af en musikalsk inspiration og alsidighed uden sidestykke også havde en dårlig smag næsten uden sidestykke. Pinlighederne stod i kø - men hey, det var ligesom en del af pakken. De cheesy symboler, de krasse farver, og en uhindret adgang til de mest sirupsklæbrige store følelser. Jeg har altid opfattet det som en del af Princes forbindelse til den store sorte musiktradition at han også har noget af det mest blæverklamme fra både soul og gospel med i sin musik. Man kan ikke være Prince-fan uden at omfavne den side af musikken også.

I 1987 virkede det som om Prince var på kanten til at nå en Beatlesk storhed; Sign Of The Times var stort anlagt, og vellykket og lyder skiftevis af næsten alt; stram funk, rene radiorockballader, stort anlagt orkesterpop og private kærlighedssange i forskellige afskygninger. Altsammen suverænt skruet sammen, Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince*. Og så var det som om han holdt op. Black Album blev holdt tilbage og erstattet af det lidt blege low-risk projekt Lovesexy; og så begyndte Prince decideret at træde vande. Diamonds and Pearls ramte mere skemaerne fra de genrer Prince betjener sig af end nogen storhed. Batman-pladen snakker vi slet ikke om. Der var den uskønne angst for ikke at være cool længere, overhalet indenom af hiphop. Det fik Prince til at hyre secondrate rappere og forsøge at følge med, men kom aldrig til at lyde som andet end pinagtige forsøg på at spille noget musik man ikke rigtig forstår. Der kom en laang stribe halvdårlige albums. Lovesymbol-pladen var et lyspunkt, men er også uudholdeligt cheesy, med rædselsfulde Kirstie Alley-mellemspil, og den hæslige 3 Chains O' Gold. Trippel-CD rædslen Emancipation var ikke nogen fornøjelse.

Netop derfor var Musicology så befriende - for her var Prince tilbage ved den musik han selv er vokset op med og mestrer til fingerspidserne. Drømmen om at følge med, og være mest cool, var lagt på hylden; til gengæld fik vi et fremragende Prince-album, hvor man kunne høre at Prince stadig har melodierne, arrangementerne, og ikke mindst stemmen, til at skabe en virkelig god plade. 3121 moderniserede lyden, men holdt nogenlunde kvaliteten - men så har det for mig også ca været det, med albums man faktisk har lyst til at høre det hele af. Der er en god sang her og der; men ikke noget man sætter på i fuld længde. Måske er det derfor jeg alligevel ikke har sat bloggen i lilla - der har været meget langt mellem snapsene meget længe. Den sene Prince er mere den bedste fortolker af den store Prince - og han har gudskelov spillet musikken hele tiden.

Når man sådan sidder og tænker igennem hvad det var, der var så fascinerende ved Prince, udover hans indiskutable suveræne teknik som popsnedker, sanger og guitarist, så var det nok - at her var en ægte musikfan; det er tydeligt fra alle de genrer han har forsøgt sig i, hvor meget han holder af dem, som fan. Han bevægede sig ubesværet rundt i hele den sorte musik han var vokset op med, men også i alt 70ernes øvrige popmusik, fra den hvideste radiorock til synthesizerne og sen-70ernes skramlede minimale post-punk lyd som han gjorde til sin egen på gennembrudspladerne. Det diminutive geni fra Minneapolis kunne lide det hele og spillede det hele. Man kan høre hans idoler gennem hans musik. Prince har introduceret mig til tre eneste mennesker på jordkloden mere funky end ham selv (James Brown, Sly Stone og George Clinton, hvis du skulle være i tvivl) - og til lyden og følelsesindholdet fra soulmusik og gospelmusik, som sjældent er langt væk, når man hører Prince synge.

Jeg har altid undret mig over hvorfor han stoppede op, der i 1987. Jeg tænkte på det dengang som om han flirtede med at være sofistikeret og europæisk, og måske kom det bare lidt for langt væk fra rødderne. Eller også var det fornemmelsen af hiphoppen, der buldrede frem og stjal den sorte musik fra ham. Vi må slå os til tåls med at selv om han holdt op med at genopfinde al sin yndlingsmusik dengang, blev han ved med at spille den for os.

* except where indicated

Pierre Omidyar is just trolling you now. 

How else to explain the bombshell investigative report just published on The Intercept, the politics site 100% owned and controlled by the billionaire eBay founder?

"Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts" reads the click-baity headline. And indeed the two charts do show that a large number of Google staffers have held high level meetings at the White House during the Obama administration. 

The piece goes on to explain that:

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects...

The Intercept teamed up with Campaign for Accountability to present two revealing data sets from that forthcoming project: one on the number of White House meetings attended by Google representatives, and the second on the revolving door between Google and the government.

If any of that seems slightly familiar, it might be because two years Pando published a very similar story about how tech billionaires have been pouring through the doors of the Obama Whitehouse. 

As I wrote at the time, one billionaire was a particularly frequent visitor...

1. Why Should I Trust You?: Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier (PDF) -- LIME, a novel explanation technique that explains the predictions of any classifier in an interpretable and faithful manner, by learning an interpretable model locally around the prediction. Torkington's Second Law: there's no problem with machine learning that more machine learning can't fix.
2. How Etsy Formats Currency -- I'm saving this one because it chafes every time I do it, and I do it wrong every time.
3. Magic Leap in Wired -- massive story by Kevin Kelly on the glories of Magic Leap, which The Verge noted still left a lot of open questions, such as "what the hell IS Magic Leap's technology" and "why does everyone who works for Magic Leap sound like they're on acid when they talk about the technology?" Everyone who wants their pixel-free glorious VR to be true is crossing fingers hoping it's not another Theranos. The bit that stuck from the Wired piece was People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.
4. Curing Our Slack Addiction -- an interesting counterpoint to the "in the future everyone will be on 15,000 Slacks" Slack-maximalist view. For AgileBits, it distracted, facilitated, and rewarded distracting behaviour, ultimately becoming a drain rather than an accelerant.

Four Short Links is moving — On 5/9/16, new editions of Nat's Four Short Links will be published at oreilly.com/ideas and oreilly.com/topics/four-short-links. The new RSS feed is available here. The existing RSS feed will soon redirect to this new feed. Please send questions or concerns to onlinecap@oreilly.com.

Stephen Curry made 402 three-pointers this regular season, which is ridiculous. Gregor Aisch and Kevin Quealy put the record into context showing just how much far ahead of others Curry was. No one has even made at least 300 three-pointers.

Tags: basketball, New York Times, Stephen Curry

This weekend Johnny Depp and his wife Amber Heard posted a bizarre apology video to Australia for not declaring their dogs when they brought them into the country. They were in violation of biosecurity laws and faced prison time. But this isn’t the first time that the land down under has been hostile to American entertainers who don’t show enough respect for Australia. In 1974 the country literally threatened to hold Frank Sinatra hostage.

Read more...

1. Security Controls for Computer Systems -- Declassified 1970s DoD security document is still relevant today. (via Ars Technica)
2. Checking Up on Dataflow Analyses -- notable for a very easy-to-follow introduction to what dataflow analysis is. Long after the chatbot startups have flamed out, formal methods research in CS will be a key part of the next wave of software where code writes code.
3. Fair Use Triumphs in Supreme Court (Ars Technica) -- a headline I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers' claims. That decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.
4. The Secret History of Internet Moderators (The Verge) -- the horrors and trauma of the early folks who developed content moderation systems (filtering violence, porn, child abuse, etc.) for Facebook, YouTube, and other user-contributed-content sites. It's still a quiet and under-supported area of most startups. Some of them now meet roughly monthly for dinner, and I'm kinda glad I'm not around the table for that conversation!

Four Short Links is moving — On 5/9/16, new editions of Nat's Four Short Links will be published at oreilly.com/ideas and oreilly.com/topics/four-short-links. The new RSS feed is available here. The existing RSS feed will soon redirect to this new feed. Please send questions or concerns to onlinecap@oreilly.com.

Online comments are an odd entity that can get out of hand quickly, and it only takes one or two sour comments to sully an entire thread. To shed some light on the dark side of online commenting, the Guardian commissioned research for their own archive of 70 million comments.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

This is why I closed comments a couple of years ago. I wasn’t get any abuse, but at some point it was like every comment was either really negative, self-promotion, or just straight-up spam. I don’t even want to imagine what comments look like for mainstream sites.

Tags: comments, Guardian

1. How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time (PDF) -- Hal Varian's article is to economics research what The Manual by the KLF is to pop music.
2. Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? (Scientific American) -- an overview of the kind of scientific argument one normally has in the pub rather than Scientific American.
3. Intel Ledger -- open source experimental distributed ledger from Intel, described here.
4. Berkeley Lab captures first high-res 3D images of DNA segments (Kurzweil) -- "This is the first time for directly visualizing an individual double-strand DNA segment in 3D."

• martinleopold/pUI: Graphical User Interface Library for Processing
  Simple, but non-horrible Processing GUI library that isn't ControlP5.
  (tags: processing gui interaction )

1. Fairness in Machine Learning -- read this fabulous presentation. Most ML objective functions create models accurate for the majority class at the expense of the protected class. One way to encode "fairness" might be to require similar/equal error rates for protected classes as for the majority population.
2. Safety Constraints and Ethical Principles in Collective Decision-Making Systems (PDF) -- self-driving cars are an example of collective decision-making between intelligent agents and, possibly, humans. Damn it's hard to find non-paywalled research in this area. This is horrifying for the list of things you can't ensure in collective decision-making systems.
3. State of Hardware Report (Nate Evans) -- rundown of the stats related to hardware startups. (via Renee DiResta)
4. A Recent Discussion about DRM (Joi Ito) -- strong arguments against including Digital Rights Management in W3C's web standards (I can't believe we're still debating this; it's such a self-evidently terrible idea to bake disempowerment into web standards).

If you can stop gawping at Alaska's gorgeous scenery long enough, you can witness drone footage of a whole lot of salmon migrating upstream from Lake Iliamna¹ to spawn. (via digg)

1. Lake Iliamna is home to the supposed Iliamna Lake Monster, a beast "10-30 feet in length with a square-like head that is used to place blunt force unto things such as small boats". Where's the drone footage of that?!↩

It didn’t happen in 2010, but it will in 2016.

The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010.

That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of today’s report.

It’s pretty freaking amazing — and amazingly freaky, when you dig down to the business assumptions behind it. Here’s the gist:

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

It gets worse:

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen — tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks — competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges. “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.” The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer. As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles. But over two-thirds — 2,224 — were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers. For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss. The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side.

Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions.

The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertsing business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff.

Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.

Trust me, if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want. (Even Amazon, widely regarded as the best at this stuff, sucks to some degree.)

Meanwhile I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill. I’m ready to share that information on exactly those conditions.

Tools to do that will be far more leveraged in the ready-to-spend economy than any guesswork system. (And we’re working on those tools.) Chris Locke put it best in Cluetrain eleven years ago. He said, if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal, that dealing may finally come in 2010.

[Later…] Jeff Jarvis thinks the Journal is being silly. I love Jeff, and I agree that the Journal may be blurring some concerns, off-base on some of the tech and even a bit breathless; but I also think they’re on to something, and I’m glad they’re on it.

Most people don’t know how much they’re being followed, and I think what the Journal’s doing here really does mark a turning point.

I also think, as I said, that the deeper story is the market for advertising, which is actually threatened by absolute personalization. (The future market for real engagement, however, is enormous. But that’s a different business than advertising — and it’s no less thick with data… just data that’s voluntarily shared with trusted limits to use by others.)

[Later still…] TechCrunch had some fun throwing Eric Clemons and Danny Sullivan together. Steel Cage Debate On The Future Of Online Advertising: Danny Sullivan Vs. Eric Clemons, says the headline. Eric’s original is Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet. Danny’s reply is at that first link. As you might guess, I lean toward Eric on this one. But this post is a kind of corollary to Eric’s case, which is compressed here (at the first link again):

I stand by my earlier points:

• Users don’t trust ads
• Users don’t want to view ads
• Users don’t need ads
• Ads cannot be the sole source of funding for the internet
• Ad revenue will diminish because of brutal competition brought on by an oversupply of inventory, and it will be replaced in many instances by micropayments and subscription payments for content.
• There are numerous other business models that will work on the net, that will be tried, and that will succeed.

The last point, actually, seemed to be the most important. It was really the intent of the article, and the original title was “Business Models for Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising.” This point got lost in the fury over the title of the article and in rage over the idea that online advertising might lose its importance.

My case is that advertisers themselves will tire of the guesswork business when something better comes along. Whether or not that “something better” funds Web sites and services is beside the points I am making, though it could hardly be a more important topic.

For what it’s worth, I believe that the Googles of the world are well positioned to take advantage of a new economy in which demand drives supply at least as well as supply drives demand. So, in fact, are some of those back-end data companies. (Disclosure: I currently consult one of them.)

Look at it this way…

• What if all that collected data were yours and not just theirs?
• What if you could improve that data voluntarily?
• What if there were standard ways you could get that data back, and use it in your own ways?
• What if those same companies were in the business of helping you buy stuff, and not just helping sellers target you?

Those questions are all on the table now.

___________________

9 April 2016 — The What They Know series ran in The Wall Street Journal until 2012. Since then the tracking economy has grown into a monster that Shoshana Zuboff calls The Big Other, and Surveillance Capitalism.

The tide against surveillance began to turn with the adoption of ad blockers and tracking blockers. But, while those provide a measure of relief, they don’t fix the problem. For that we need tools that engage the publishers and advertisers of the world, in ways that work for them as well.

They might think it’s working for them today; but it’s clearly not, and this has been apparent for a long time.

In Identity and the Independent Web, published in October 2010, John Battelle said “the fact is, the choices provided to us as we navigate are increasingly driven by algorithms modeled on the service’s understanding of our identity. We know this, and we’re cool with the deal.”

In The Data Bubble II (also in October 2010) I replied,

In fact we don’t know, we’re not cool with it, and it isn’t a deal.

If we knew, The Wall Street Journal wouldn’t have a reason to clue us in at such length.

We’re cool with it only to the degree that we are uncomplaining about it — so far.

And it isn’t a “deal” because nothing was ever negotiated.

To have a deal, both parties need to come to the table with terms the other can understand and accept. For example, we could come with a term that says, Just show me ads that aren’t based on tracking me. (In other words, Just show me the kind of advertising we’ve always had in the offline world — and in the online one before the surveillance-based “interactive” kind gave brain cancer to Madison Avenue.)

And that’s how we turn the tide. This month. We’ll prepare the work on VRM Day (25 April), and then hammer it into code at IIW (26–28 April). By the end of that week we’ll post the term and the code at Customer Commons (which was designed for that purpose, on the Creative Commons model).

Having this term (which needs a name — help us think of one) is a good deal for advertisers because non-tracking based ads are not only perfectly understood and good at doing what they’ve always done, but because they are actually worth more (thank you, Don Marti) than the tracking-based kind.

It’s a good deal for high-reputation publishers, because it gets them out of a shitty business that tracks their readers to low reputation sites where placing ads is cheaper. And it lets them keep publishing ads that readers can appreciate because the ads clearly support the publication. (Bet they can charge more for the ads too, simply because they are worth more.)

It’s even good for the “interactive” advertising business because it allows the next round of terms to support advertising based on tracking that the reader actually welcomes. If there is such a thing, however, it needs to be on terms the reader asserts, and not on labor-intensive industry-run opt-out systems such as Ad Choices.

If you have a stake in these outcomes, come to VRM Day and IIW and help us make it happen. VRM Day is free, and IIW is very cheap compared to most other conferences. It is also an unconference. That means it has no keynotes or panels. Instead it’s about getting stuff done, over three days of breakouts, all on topics chosen by you, me and anybody else who shows up.

When we’re done, the Data Bubble will start bursting for real. It won’t mean that data goes away, however. It will just mean that data gets put to better uses than the icky ones we’ve put up with for at least six years too long.

_________________

This post also appears in Medium.

Yesterday, I wrote about how First Look Media paid superstar muckraker (and champion of the underpaid) close to a quarter of a million dollars in 2014 for publishing precisely zero articles.

Today we learn that Pierre Omidyar was not quite so generous with all his reporters.

Take, for example, Ken Silverstein, the famed investigative journalist hired in 2013 by Omidyar as First Look’s senior investigative reporter. Silverstein was still employed by First Look Media when, in late 2014, he wrote a killer story about Mossack Fonseca. Which is to say, he was months and months ahead of the Guardian and everyone else who are currently publishing bombshell after bombshell about the shady law firm.

1. cello -- home page for the Verilogish programming language to design computational circuits in living cells.
2. Internet of Bricked Discontinued Things (BusinessInsider) -- Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.
3. Bitcoin Users Reveal More Than They Think -- new technologies trace BTC transactions, attempting to identify bitcoin users. A number of startups have raised money to explore these new possibilities
4. Last Three Months of Paper-a-Day (Adrian Colyer) -- a pointer to the highlights from the 68 papers he covered in the first three months of the year.

You know Cloudflare. Course you do.

They sit between your website and the rest of the Internet and make sure DDOS attacks and other nasty traffic doesn’t get through. They’re so ubiquitous that many web hosting companies offer Cloudflare configuration as a one-click add on.

In other words, Cloudflare sees a lot of web traffic and knows a thing or two about identifying threats.

No wonder, then, that the Tor project is (characteristically) furious that Cloudflare has revealed a staggering 94% of Tor traffic passing through its network is flagged as malicious...