Claus.dahl

In this video about the making of The Hobbit movies, members of the film crew, including director Peter Jackson, admit that they didn't really have a good idea of what was going to happen in the movies until they were on the set filming and that they made a lot of it up as they went along.

The above clip is from a behind-the-scenes video on the Battle of the Five Armies Blu-ray, and it features Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and other production personnel confessing that due to the director changeover -- del Toro left the project after nearly two years of pre-production -- Jackson hit the ground running but was never able to hit the reset button to get time to establish his own vision. In comparison, he spent years prepping the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, and on the Hobbit things got so bad that when they started shooting the titular Battle of Five Armies itself they were essentially just shooting B-roll: footage of people in costumes waving around swords, without any cohesive plan for how the sequence would actually play out. (A choice Jackson quote: "I didn't know what the hell I was doing.")

No idea why they would release a video like this which pretty much admits that the movies weren't as good as they should have been. I mean, they still made a crap-ton of money at the box office (a combined $3 billion worldwide), so happy ending for them anyway I guess?

From Steven Pinker's book, The Sense of Style, here are some of the most common words and phrases that trip people up.

Bemused means bewildered and does not mean amused.

Correct: The unnecessarily complex plot left me bemused. / The silly comedy amused me.

Data is a plural count noun not, standardly speaking, a mass noun. [Note: "Data is rarely used as a plural today, just as candelabra and agenda long ago ceased to be plurals," Pinker writes. "But I still like it."]

Correct: "This datum supports the theory, but many of the other data refute it."

Enormity means extreme evil and does not mean enormousness. [Note: It is acceptable to use it to mean a deplorable enormousness.]

Correct: The enormity of the terrorist bombing brought bystanders to tears. / The enormousness of the homework assignment required several hours of work.

A deplorable enormousness!

1. Networks, Crowds, and Markets -- network theory (graph analysis), small worlds, network effects, power laws, markets, voting, property rights, and more. A book that came out of a Cornell course by ACM-lauded Jon Kleinberg.
2. Qu -- a framework for building data APIs. From a government department, no less. (via Nelson Minar)
3. Three Most Common M-Commerce Questions Answered (Facebook) -- When we examined basket sizes on an m-site versus an app, we found people spend 43 cents in app to every $1 spent on m-site. (via Alex Dong)
4. Phonelabs -- science labs with mobile phones. All open sourced for maximum spread.

As of last month, 685 multi-planet solar systems (with 1705 planets) have been discovered outside our own. This video shows the relative sizes of those systems compared to ours. Please note:

The size of the orbits are all to scale, but the size of the planets are not. For example, Jupiter is actually 11x larger than Earth, but that scale makes Earth-size planets almost invisible (or Jupiters annoyingly large).

(via @daveg)

Check out more great covers at the NY Times, Buzzfeed, and The Casual Optimist. Compare with last year's picks.

1. The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism -- The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. [...] First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive 21st century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior. (via Simon St Laurent)
2. Thunder -- Spark-driven analysis from Jupyter notebooks (open source).
3. Hacking Mobile Phones Using 2D-Printed Fingerprints (PDF) -- equipment costs less than $450, and all you need is a photo of the fingerprint. (like those of government employees stolen en masse last year)
4. SSHKeyDistribut0r (Github) -- A tool to automate key distribution with user authorization [...] for sysop teams.

YouTube user darman212 used iOS coding app Hopscotch and Final Cut Pro X to make a version of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer entirely out of emoji. BB-8 is a soccer ball with a bowl of ramen on his head!

(via @marcprecipice)

1. Things Software Leaders Should Know (Ben Gracewood) -- If you have people things and tech things on your to-do list, put the people things first on the list.
2. The Hadoop Ecosystem -- table of the different projects across the Hadoop ecosystem.
3. Narcos GPS-Spoofing Border Drones -- not only are the border drones expensive and ineffective, now they're being tricked. Basic trade-off: more reliability or longer flight times?
4. A Model Explanation System (PDF) -- you can explain any machine-learned decision, though not necessarily the way the model came to the decision. Confused? This summary might help. Explainability is not a property of the model.

"Madeline the Robot Tamer" is a really lovely video about Madeline Gannon, a woman who dances, so to speak, with robots. As a resident at Pier 9, she developed Quipt, "a gesture-based control software that gives industrial robots basic spatial behaviors for interacting closely with people." It's a wonderful demonstration of robots and humans learning to work together.

(via Laughing Squid)

1. Is Caffeine a Cognitive Enhancer? (PDF) -- Two general mechanisms may account for most of the observed effects of caffeine on performance: (1) an indirect, non-specific ‘arousal’ or ‘processing resources’ factor, presumably explaining why the effects of caffeine are generally most pronounced when task performance is sustained or degraded under suboptimal conditions; and (2) a more direct and specific ‘perceptual-motor’ speed or efficiency factor that may explain why, under optimal conditions, some aspects of human performance and information processing, in particular those related to sensation, perception, motor preparation, and execution, are more sensitive to caffeine effects than those related to cognition, memory, and learning. See also Smith 2005's caffeine led to a more positive mood and improved performance on a number of tasks. Different effects of caffeine were seen depending on the person’s level of arousal. Linear effects of caffeine dose were also observed. This is evidence against the argument that behavioral changes due to caffeine are merely the reversal of negative effects of a long period of caffeine abstinence. (via cogsci.stackexchange.com)
2. On Stars and Thinking Things Through (Courtney Johnston) -- Matt (to my eyes, anyway) doesn't have a singular 'thing': he has this kind of spangly web of interests and skills that coalesces around a line of enquiry and results in the making or doing of a thing, and these things in turn become part of that web and generate further experiments and thinking. Seconded.
3. Human-like Robot -- and just like a real woman, the first paragraphs about the robot focus on soft skin and flowing brunette hair not how well she does her job. Progress!
4. Website Obesity (Maciej Ceglowski) -- The javascript alone in "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate" is longer than /Remembrance of Things Past/.

♫ My Top 5 #lastfm artists: Nils Frahm (17), Max Richter (7), Gaika (6), Soichi Terada (5) & MBONGWANA S.. via @tweeklyfm #music

— russell davies (@undermanager) January 3, 2016

As is now traditional for a Monday, above is my spotify listening for the week. There's not a lot to say, it was a week of gentle listening, that post-Christmas lull.

Below are my top 10 listenings for the year (based on last.fm scrobbles, not that reliable).

I clearly love Mr Richard J. Birkin don't I?

With hindsight, it seems bloody obvious the Sun and not the Earth is the center of the solar system. Occam's razor and all that. (via @somniumprojec)

1. Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems (PDF) -- We explore several ML-specific risk factors to account for in system design. These include boundary erosion, entanglement, hidden feedback loops, undeclared consumers, data dependencies, configuration issues, changes in the external world, and a variety of system-level anti-patterns.
2. Large-Scale Content-Based Matching of Midi and Audio Files -- We present a system that can efficiently match and align MIDI files to entries in a large corpus of audio content based solely on content, i.e., without using any metadata.
3. Critical Social Research on Self-Tracking -- I am currently working on an article that is a comprehensive review of both literatures, in the attempt to outline what each can contribute to understanding self-tracking as an ethos and a practice, and its wider sociocultural implications. Here is a reading list of the work from critical social researchers that I am aware of. Trigger warning: phrases like "The discursive construction of student subjectivities."
4. Warp-CTC -- Baidu's open source deep learning code. Connectionist Temporal Classification is a loss function useful for performing supervised learning on sequence data, without needing an alignment between input data and labels.

• Every* Recording of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie 1″ Played at the Same Time
  Merged together in the way that makes most coherent sense: using the start/end of the longest track as the markers to stretch the others to; turning rubato in performance into what sounds like granular synthesis, almost. Good write-up, too: the more I listen to this, the more thoughtful it gets.
  (tags: music satie repurposing sampling delay )

This month, HBO is airing a special edition of The Godfather that presents scenes from the first two movies in chronological order with some deleted scenes mixed in for good measure. It's more than 7 hours long. It's not listed anywhere on HBO's site, but supposedly it'll run all month on HBO and their online and on-demand services.

This is maddening if true: according to an industry insider, vendors making tie-in products for the new Star Wars movie were directed by Disney¹ to exclude Rey from Star Wars related merchandise.

In January 2015, a number of toy and merchandise vendors descended on Lucasfilm's Letterman Center in San Francisco. In a series of confidential meetings, the vendors presented their product ideas to tie in with the highly-anticipated new Star Wars film. Representatives presented, pitched, discussed, and agreed upon prototype products. The seeds of the controversies Lucasfilm is facing regarding the marketing and merchandising of The Force Awakens were sown in those meetings, according to the industry insider.

The insider, who was at those meetings, described how initial versions of many of the products presented to Lucasfilm featured Rey prominently. At first, discussions were positive, but as the meetings wore on, one or more individuals raised concerns about the presence of female characters in the Star Wars products. Eventually, the product vendors were specifically directed to exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise, said the insider.

"We know what sells," the industry insider was told. "No boy wants to be given a product with a female character on it."

What good does it do our culture if JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy work to make popular movies with progressive characters if the cowards in marketing are not going to follow suit?

Update: Lots of people are sharing this story, and I wanted to highlight and explain the "if true" in the first paragraph. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the article I linked to. It relies completely on a single anonymous source. I have no idea what Sweatpants and Coffee's fact-checking procedures are. There are also many Star Wars related products featuring Rey (like Lego), so clearly the directive to "exclude the Rey character from all Star Wars-related merchandise" was either not issued in such a restrictive manner or was disregarded in some cases.

1. The article was annoyingly unclear on who was doing the directing, but you have to assume it's Disney. Who else in the room would have the authority to so direct?↩

1. The Mortality of Companies -- Geoffrey West paper: we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age. We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector.
2. The Fortune 500 Teller -- profile of Geoffrey West. (via Roger Dennis)
3. Gizmo -- a microservice toolkit in Golang from NYT. (via InfoQ)
4. Intellectual Need and Problem-Free Activity in the Mathematics Classroom (PDF) -- Although this is not an empirical study, we use data from observed high school algebra classrooms to illustrate four categories of activity students engage in while feeling little or no intellectual need. We present multiple examples for each category in order to draw out different nuances of the activity, and we contrast the observed situations with ones that would provide various types of intellectual need. Finally, we offer general suggestions for teaching with intellectual need.

1. Neutral Nets on Encrypted Data (Paper a Day) -- By using a technique known as homohorphic encryption, it’s possible to perform operations on encrypted data, producing an encrypted result, and then decrypt the result to give back the desired answer. By combining homohorphic encryption with a specially designed neural network that can operate within the constraints of the operations supported, the authors of CryptoNet are able to build an end-to-end system whereby a client can encrypt their data, send it to a cloud service that makes a prediction based on that data – all the while having no idea what the data means, or what the output prediction means – and return an encrypted prediction to the client, which can then decrypt it to recover the prediction. As well as making this possible, another significant challenge the authors had to overcome was making it practical, as homohorphic encryption can be expensive.
2. VR for IoT Prototype (YouTube) -- a VR prototype created for displaying sensor data and video streaming in real time from IoT sensors/camera devices designed for rail or the transportation industry.
3. Is Group Chat Making You Sweat? (Jason Fried) -- all excellent points. Our attention and focus are the scarce and precious resources of the 21st century.
4. How Devices Provide Haptic Feedback -- good intro to what's happening in your hardware.

1. Improv -- a javascript library for generative text.
2. The Food Computer (MIT) -- open source controlled-environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems to control and monitor climate, energy, and plant growth inside of a specialized growing chamber. Climate variables such as carbon dioxide, air temperature, humidity, dissolved oxygen, potential hydrogen, electrical conductivity, and root-zone temperature are among the many conditions that can be controlled and monitored within the growing chamber. Operational energy, water, and mineral consumption are monitored (and adjusted) through electrical meters, flow sensors, and controllable chemical dosers throughout the growth period. (via IEEE Spectrum)
3. 10 Golden Rules for Becoming a Better Programmer -- what are your 10 rules for being better in your field? If you haven't built a list, then you aren't thinking hard enough about what you do.
4. Statsbot -- Google Analytics bot for Slack from NewRelic.

dduane:

vortexsophia:

Seriously, has no one proposed this man to the Vatican for sainthood? Surely there must be a miracle or three lying around out there that’s associated with him…

In the book In Pursuit of the Unknown, Ian Stewart discusses how equations from the likes of Pythagoras, Euler, Newton, Fourier, Maxwell, and Einstein have been used to build the modern world.

I love how as time progresses, the equations get more complicated and difficult for the layperson to read (much less understand) and then Boltzmann and Einstein are like, boom!, entropy is increasing and energy is proportional to mass, suckas!