mkalus shared this story from The Verge - All Posts.

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Quote:

You should be worried, too. George Bush, a man of comparative calm and measured intellect, started two foreign wars and cratered the world economy.  Trump is far more reckless.

We are speeding toward a dark corridor, my friends. Keep your eyes open, your hearts stout and be ready for the fight.

– Dave Eggers, The Guardian: “None of the old rules apply”

You should read Weapons of Math Destruction, you're probably planning to, I am. It might be queued up on your kindle or bedside table. You might be getting it for Christmas. But maybe you won't get round to it. That's possible. We're all busy. So, just in case, listen to this. It's fascinating stuff.

Cathy O'Neill talks about Weapons of Math Destruction.

My first year film at calarts!
It's about how people get energized by different sources and situations, focusing on introversion because that's what I know better hah
Thanks everyone who helped me with it, and thank you Louie Zong for compositing the music!

Also, you can watch my classmates awesome films: 2016 CalArts Character Animation Student Films

(and it's in my tumblr- juluia.tumblr.com/post/143410910810/my-first-year-film-at-calarts-thanks-everyone-who )

Cast: Julia Rodrigues

Tags: introversion, calarts 2016, extroversion, calarts and juluia

I had occasion to check the spelling of “copacetic” yesterday, because the server that hosts the Tinderbox Backstage program got fouled up and everything was far, far from copacetic. The spelling turned out to be perfectly in order, though I wondered whether the word has anything to do with acetic acid, which derives from a Latin word for vinegar.

It turns out that “copacetic” has been something Americans say since 1910 or so. It’s a new word, but it’s not that unusual. Everyone on my 9th grade knew it. Still, nobody knows where it came from, and beyond fairly confident dismissals of folk etymologies from Hebrew, Italian, and Cajun French.

Speaking of etymologies and 9th grade, back then our crowd was much taken with “Sumer Is Icumen In”.

That last line was fun for 9th grade and seems to carry us back to a simpler, earthier time. But seriously: it’s one thing to spend a lot of time chasing bucks, but if you’re close enough to know whether the buck farteth or not, that buck must be drunk. And do bucks particularly relish beans in early summer?

Something has got to distract one from watching Ubuntu installations while checking Twitter for the latest outrages against law and propriety. We are not copacetic.

Matthias, a 25 year-old German photo-retoucher now living in Poland, knew as he crested the mountain after an exhausting day that his timing couldn’t have been more perfect. After four bus transfers that day, followed by hitchiking with a couple of German guys he had to ditch on the trail because of their slow pace, ultimately running the last few kilometers of the 12km trail (with full camping gear on his back) to reach the Trolltunga overlook near Odda, Norway just as the sun began to set on one of the only clear days of the season.

“It literally rained every single day for months. I was afraid I’d never make it to Trolltunga,” Matthias laughed. He did make it, all in the quest to get a different shot. That’s when he realized dedication was worth it and a new outlook on his photography career was born.

Matthias Dengler’s Fear of Settling

“I’ve had a lot of jobs – accountant, translator, tour guide, journalist, retoucher – but I’ve also learned a lot.” With the goal of becoming a full-time photographer and earning brand sponsorships to assist with his travels, Matthias currently shoots a combination of city, fashion, and outdoor photography.

Matthias grew up in Germany and lived in various parts of the country. After two years of studying in Frankfurt he left for Poland, where he continued to explore the most beautiful parts of the country while living in Gdansk, Sopot, and Gdynia. Currently back in Gdansk after six months in Norway where he makes his living as a retoucher for a fashion retoucher and is a freelance editor.

“For me living abroad lets me feel alive,” he explained. “You meet so many people and learn so many things no university could ever teach. I can settle down when I run out of power one day, but I want to see the world and capture all its beauty on my way … want to inspire people to find what makes them happy … to travel and push themselves.”

Where he grew up in Germany, and even more so in Poland, there is an intense pressure to follow a standard path (or rather a complacency to): graduate high school, study, master, start working, get married, and after getting an unlimited employment contract have a child, buy a flat, settle.

“Most of the time people go the direct way of life without even thinking about another way. I don’t get it. The fear of settling down drives me to travel.”

Matthias’ drive to travel is equally as strong as his desire to improve his photography technique. Knowing all the ins and outs of editing, the bigger challenge comes in “pushing every image to its limits” naturally, a photography approach he has studied from Elia Locardi.

“On Flickr you find so many different and much more creative approaches to photography. And when you show positivity you gain positivity,” he explained, a lesson learned from the people in Norway.

When Matthias finds new places from Flickr or travel blogs he maps them out on Google and adds them to a shortlist, researching various great shots that have been taken there on Flickr and what could be taken there. Other platforms frustrate him. They’re “full of pictures taken at the same prestigious place from the exact same position and with the same composition. So it’s absolutely boring. That’s why I love Flickr so much!”

Recently he’s begun sharing more of the day to day and behind the scenes process of shooting and editing on Instagram using the Instagram Stories feature.

“There are so many bad photoshop composites out there that are obvious and cheap. I see Milky Way pictures all over the place which are pure copy and paste … Instagram is a blog replacement for me.”

Matthias has manually toiled and engaged with his FlickrFam to improve (and help them improve). They don’t get complacent. They encourage, critique, and they work.

“Flickr is always the most important because I want to attract other photographers who can appreciate quality. I only have people who appreciate my work (organic followers) and who wait for my daily uploads.”

And eventually he hopes to attract brands that have an understanding and appreciation (and budget) for hiring quality photographers. “When you show positivity you gain positivity.”

Matthias’ Litmus Test – Water

Matthias already knows how to edit. Self-taught and rather skilled, his focus now is on capturing nature or cities from a different angle and perspective that make the viewer question what reality they’re seeing (without photoshop).

“What exactly is reality,” he questions. “I can’t fully understand a place in a photograph because once you capture it the 3D world loses a dimension. It’s already not reality, at least no more than a dog’s reality is in black and white while ours is in color.”

For a long time Matthias wanted to live near the sea because water is a substance that can be transfixed and transformed by a camera.

“I love the power of water and all you can do with it photographically. Long exposure allows me to show nature in a way the human eye can’t see it. [With skill] I can smoothen out waves, give rivers a dreamy, milky look, or use lakes as a mirror for reflections. Everything just pure nature, straight out of the camera, no photoshop.”

To hear him describe it and looking at his examples it’s clear that water photography isn’t something everyone can do. Epic waterfalls, serene rivers, and dreamy fjords are Matthias’ litmus test.

“It let’s people know that I’m legit. It takes timing, lighting, patience, and your own creativity at the place itself.”

Either way, on a mountain or by the sea, Matthias finds refuge in nature. It’s a “resort,” to camp on a spot once the crowds have dispersed and experiment with his camera, taking in the massive impact of the natural environment.

 

Life Lessons Matthias Hopes To Champion

• Don’t take the same shots as everyone else. Make them your own!

• Embrace discomfort. The discomfort of learning, travel, uncertainty will pay off in the end if you’re working hard to perfect your craft. Be dedicated.

• Show positivity; gain positivity.

• Travel. Explore. Create.

View more of Matthias Dengler’s photography on his Flickr Photostream. To buy prints, download his ebook, see more of his retouching visit his website: Snapshopped.

Given the more serious consideration being given to addressing the affordable housing issue through rezoning, Byrn Davidson thinks this piece by UBC urban design professor Patrick Condon is worth reprinting.

 

Carve Up Vancouver Housing Stock Into Smaller Affordable Pieces

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A proposal for affordable housing that is context sensitive and preserves heritage homes.

A large swath of Vancouver virtually all zoned RS-1 for single-family dwellings averaging well over a million dollars each. What if we let those homes be divided into three or more dwellings each?

Wall Street was already hustling and bustling at 7:30am on the Monday before Thanksgiving. However, amid the desk workers jostling their way into the skyscrapers, a few tourists posed for their photos in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Behind them, positioned between three American flags and beneath six towering Corinthian columns, a lurid yellow banner proclaimed incongruously: ‘NYSE: Add us on Snapchat’.

The juxtapositioning of classical architecture and transient, garish advertising certainly wasn’t preventing the various shutterbugs from taking their selfies in front of the building. Those images, whether taken on a smartphone or compact camera, will preserve this awkward moment in time. It feels like a transition period, when venerable institutions like the New York Stock Exchange wear their populist intentions like politicians attired for one day only in the kit of a local sports team.

The scene was all the more noticeable because it contrasted sharply with the other Snapchat encounters I’ve had while travelling in the US. The night before I was standing in the foyer of a suburban Buffalo Wild Wings, watching an American ritual unfold in the main restaurant: sunday football, fuelled by beer and extraordinary quantities of chicken wings, played out on wall-to-wall TV screens.

As we waited to pick-up our own ludicrous quantity of spiced chicken, a young girl – nine years old at most – skipped into the restaurant. She held her mother’s arm with one hand and with the other she swiped across the screen of her iPhone 7. Holding it up in front of her face, the girl used Snapchat to capture an image of Sunday Funday in full swing.

I watched as she flipped through various built-in filters at lightening speed, superimposing weather, time and date. Eventually she settled on a geotagged filter provided by Buffalo Wild Wings marketing department.

Wild Wings is one of numerous restaurants and retailers employing Snapchat’s advertising formats to connect with customers. They range from location-based filters to custom digital lenses. According to Snap’s internal data, the app reaches 41 percent of America’s 18 to 34 year olds each day. Location filters, like this one provided by Buffalo Wild Wings, are seen by 40 to 60 percent of those daily Snapchatters.  Early this year, a design agency ran its entire recruiting campaign through Snapchat.

A third example speaks to the diverse ways Snap is establishing itself as the platform for augmented visual communication and creativity.

Every morning for the past several months, a mother of two has shared a short video with her friends and family, showing the cute, snoozy reactions of her toddler waking up. It is quick, imperfect video which resonates because it means something special to a small, private audience. She rarely uses any of the filters or overlays Snapchat is becoming known for: in this instance, Snapchat works because it is simply a fast, scalable way to share video with a group.

Snap’s recent clarification of how it sees itself is reflected in these three different user stories. “Snap, Inc. is a camera company,” is the definitive statement on its homepage. It talks about a mission of ‘reinventing the camera’ to ‘improve the way people live and communicate’.

This is becoming a classic story of a tightly focused app broadening into a platform. Known initially for its distinguishing feature of temporary, self-destructing photos, Snap is iterating quickly based on the creative ways in which its users are pushing the boundaries of each version. Thus far, it has managed to maintain close correlation between user behaviours and the addition of new features.

The real test is about to begin as it starts to add new creative tools to the fledgling platform, in the form of experimental products like Spectacles (something I wrote about previously). These represent sufficiently large leaps as to require a different form of user research, looking beyond gradual iteration to speculative bets on how little clues in existing user behaviour might blossom into unexpectedly appealing new product offerings.

Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson never thought the city’s housing affordability crisis, driven by foreign money, would get so bad. If only someone had warned him. It’s downright tragic. Robertson is right that things have got very, very ugly since he moved in to City Hall in 2008, though it’s not all (or even mostly), his fault. Prices have exploded. More than 90 per cent of Vancouver’s detached homes cost beyond C$1 million, even though the city’s...

The pitch came by email from the inventor himself:

David: Our new product is designed to block the TV score ticker.

It’s a strip of black, opaque static cling film (no adhesive or Velcro) that clings to your TV or computer screen. It’s handy, reusable, and can be cut to fit any size screen.

We tried the elastic strip that you reviewed last year, but it was too small for our TV, and was clunky to use. So we developed a better solution! Thanks for checking it out! We just put it on the market, and are hoping there are others, like us, who want to avoid the dreaded score ticker!

And sure enough: That is exactly what Score Block is. You get a roll of shiny, thick film that sticks to your TV when you press it. It perfectly blocks the ticker at the bottom.

Why?

Those stupid news tickers are distracting. They’re unnecessary. They presume to know your reading speed. (In Europe, they don’t actually scroll. Each headline appears, in full, at the bottom of the screen, and lingers for a few moments. That’s less annoying, and you can read at your own speed.)

When you’re watching sports that you’ve recorded on a DVR, seeing the results of other games (that you’ve also recorded) ruins the suspense of watching them later.

When you’re watching anything else, the ticker is just distracting.

The Score Block is the answer. Looks really nice—flat and black and shiny.

So there you go: a $15 roll of cling film that does just what it says.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. Here’s how to get his columns by email.

Following a sold-out first run, Best Buy Canada has announced it will be releasing more NES Classic Consoles today, November 23rd.

A representative of the retailer wrote in the forums section of the Best Buy website that the retro console will be released in limited quantities on November 23rd, 2016, at 2:30pm ET (11:30am PT) on bestbuy.ca.

“Make sure your bestbuy.ca account information is up to date prior to placing the purchase to ensure a fast and successful transaction,” the representative cautioned, which seems like good advice considering how quickly the device sold out when it first became available in Canada on November 11th.

The NES classic has been difficult to hunt down this Holiday Shopping season, though Nintendo claims it will continually restock the console over the course of the next few weeks. The NES Classic is a miniature remake of the classic Nintendo Entertainment System released back in 1985, complete with a collection of 30 built-in titles like Super Mario bros., The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and Kirby’s Adventure.

Update 11/23/2016: Within approximately one minute of the release, the NES Classics sold out once again. Safe to say it’s the must-have gift of the season.

Related: For those wanting the NES Classic can check out Amazon as there are plenty there (but a bit more expensive).

Microsoft’s next mobile device, what many hope is the long rumoured Surface Phone, will be the “ultimate mobile device,” according to company CEO Satya Nadella.

In an interview with Australian publication the Finacial Review, Nadella didn’t acknowledge a smartphone designed by the company’s Surface team is currently in the works, but did hint that Microsoft still has ambitions in the mobile space, even after its write-off of Nokia, saying, “We will continue to be in the phone market not as defined by today’s market leaders, but by what it is that we can uniquely do in what is the most ultimate mobile device.”

What exactly the ultimate mobile device entails Nadella did not reveal, but he did intimate that the company understands it needs to deliver differentiated products if it will have any chance of success.

Referring to devices like the Elite x3, HP’s recent enterprise Continuum-focused smartphone, he said, “We stopped doing things that were me-too and started doing things, even if they are today very sub-scale, to be very focused on a specific set of customers who need a specific set of capabilities that are differentiated and that we can do a good job of.”

According to the most recent set of rumours, Microsoft could release an entire lineup of Surface smartphones aimed at different market segments.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Blaze, inferno, and conflagration are all words that can be use interchangeably with “fire.” But, as referenced in Kia’s latest recall, the carmaker has its own term to describe the incident you never want to happen to your vehicle — “thermal event.”

It’s for this fiery reason that the car manufacturer has recalled 71,704 model year 2008 and 2009 Sportage vehicles.

According to a notice [PDF] posted with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the SUVs contain a wire harness covering the Hydraulic Electronic Unit (HECU) that may be improperly sealed allowing water to get on the circuit board.

If the water is contaminated with salt — perhaps from the mixture used on icy roads — the wire harness connector pins can corrode and the circuit board may short.

This, Kia says increases the risk of a thermal event, such as an engine compartment fire.

The issue first came to light in April, when Kia received a report of an engine fire in a 2008 Sportage parked in the driveway.

While Kia didn’t specify how many thermal events it has connected to the issue, a look at NHTSA’s safercar.org database lists several fires related to Sportage vehicles’ electrical systems.

In one complaint submitted in 2013, the owner of a model year 2009 Sportage says the vehicle caught fire without warning.

The owner of another 2009 Sportage reported to SaferCar.gov that their vehicle caught fire about an hour after it was driven. In that case the fire originated in the front engine compartment.

Kia says it will notify owners of affected vehicles later this month. Dealers will inspect the connector pins for corrosion, if the issue is found, they will replace the HECU assembly and connector cover.

mkalus shared this story from vintage everyday.

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The year is 1955 and one of the world’s most famous stars is preparing to attend a show on Broadway. Marilyn Monroe, then 28 years old, takes a few moments in her room to do her makeup, dab her neck with a drop of her favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5, and ready herself for the show. In these photographs, the star’s rare quiet moments in private are revealed, showing a Monroe that’s playful, demure and just like any other woman before a big night out.

These photographs were taken by Ed Feingersh at the Ambassador Hotel in New York City. Monroe was getting ready to see the Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Morosco Theatre.

Only two month later, in May 1955, Marilyn started to see Arthur Millar, the playwright. It had been six months since she divorced second husband Joe DiMaggio, whom she had been married to for less than a year.

Step beyond the bright lights of Hollywood with these photographs to see the private side of one of the world’s best loved, and perhaps most misunderstood star: Marilyn Monroe.






See more »

Huawei and Telus have announced two new technology deployments that serve to further the development process of a next-generation 5G wireless network.

The first is the deployment of a heterogenous network (HetNet) in Vancouver. The Canadian carrier and mobile manufacturing giant state they successfully launched a HetNet through their co-sponsored Vancouver-based 5G Living Lab. For those that don’t know, a heterogenous network (HetNet) is a wireless network comprised of various different access technologies that are pieced together to provide better coverage and capacity in crowded areas and inside buildings where outdoor signals can’t reach. It’s one of the key building blocks on the path to a fully functioning 5G network.

Additionally, the two companies announced that they have enabled a Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN) in Vancouver that is now the largest deployment in North America. C-RAN is a network architecture that centralizes the management of multiple cell sites, enabling intelligent allocation of radio capacity and improved network throughput in crowded areas.

Telus customers in Vancouver will be able to reap the benefits of these new technologies beginning immediately, while most mobile users can expect to wait until 2020 until 5G becomes fully mainstream.

“We’re proud to be working with a true global innovator like Telus,” said Sean Yang, president of Huawei Canada, in a statement.

“Through our joint efforts in the 5G Living Lab, we are ensuring Vancouver and Canada are at the forefront of deploying the technologies that will bring 5G to life in the years ahead.”

This announcement builds on the company’s $1 billion CAD investment to connect Vancouver to the Telus PureFibre network, which the company’s state will provide “nearly limitless capacity to support the highly efficient, reliable and blazing-fast wireless speeds 5G will enable for customers, heightening the importance of Telus’ fibre investments across Canada.”

Related: Huawei forges R&D partnership with the University of Waterloo, pledges $3 million over three years

From the New York Times:

Until recently, scientists predicted that the global sea level could rise almost three feet by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. New research suggests faster-than-expected Antarctic melting under this scenario, threatening a rise of nearly six feet — and many feet more after 2100.

But making deep cuts in global emissions could still keep sea level rise below two feet in this century. This is the difference between a difficult but manageable problem and worldwide catastrophe, affecting land where hundreds of millions live today. In the United States, the greatest threat is to South Florida, home to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate (outlined in red).

text-mode:

ASCII-morph is a Javascript library to transition between two ASCII art works. By Timothy Holman.

h/t: Tim Koch

Richard Glover hosts the “Drive” show on ABC Sydney and writes an occasional opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald; the closest comparison is CBC Vancouver’s Stephen Quinn. An excerpt from a recent column:

The latest attempt to deskill the human race comes courtesy of the “tyre pressure monitoring system” now built into many cars.  In Britain, it’s been compulsory in all new cars sold since 2014, with the result that people no longer know how to check their own tyre pressure. The only problem: the systems routinely fail, with the result that four in 10 cars in the UK, according to a study out this week, have at least one dangerously underinflated tyre.

At same time, people put such faith in their sat-nav systems that motorists are routinely ending up in rivers and even oceans. They are, it seems, more likely to believe the view on their phone-screen than the view out their windscreen.

Reading both stories this week, a picture does form of the British motoring public – one moment veering into oncoming traffic on the M1, the next hurling themselves off the pier at Brighton. They are, I fear, taking Brexit a bit too literally.

I also fear that the machines are up to something. Each day they become a little smarter; each day, we become a little dumber.

With the latest-model cars, you no longer need to reverse park; the vehicle does it for you. Driving itself, of course, will be outsourced soon. No one even needs to cook: Google this week unveiled Google Home, a personal assistant that sits in the corner of your room, quietly learning your habits: the barked command “get me food,” will result in your preferred take-away meal arriving soon after.

Given time, Google Home will surely be able to respond to other plaintive inquiries, such as: “how do you spell bourgeoisie?” And “why can’t I ever seem to get a girlfriend?”

Filed under: Photography, Research

In this kick-off meetup we look at WeChat and why should you care.

The NYT recently produced a video describing how WeChat points the way to how messaging platforms can change our lives in the future. The Economist chimed in and highlighted a ‘Galapagos Island’ effect in the development of the technology ecosystems of China and the West. While each positioned it as “going back in time” when you go from using WeChat to a Western messaging platform, the reality is both ecosystems are bustling with innovation and can serve as inspiration for each other. 

Come for a short, 15-minute introduction to WeChat and hopefully some good discussion. Free drinks!

Keep the discussion going as well in our Facebook Messenger Room at https://m.me/g/AbbhPxENssNWBDsM.

Event Details:

Tuesday, December 6, 2016 5:30 PM

Launch Academy

#300 - 128 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

5:30 PM

mkalus shared this story from jwz.

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Facebook: Still Literally the Worst

The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people's news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added. [...]

Facebook does not intend to suppress the posts itself. Instead, it would offer the software to enable a third party -- in this case, most likely a partner Chinese company -- to monitor popular stories and topics that bubble up as users share them across the social network, the people said. Facebook's partner would then have full control to decide whether those posts should show up in users' feeds. [...]

"We won't actually censor anything -- we'll just give unfettered access and control to the Chinese government."

The suppression software has been contentious within Facebook, which is separately grappling with what should or should not be shown to its users after the American presidential election's unexpected outcome spurred questions over fake news on the social network. Several employees who were working on the project have left Facebook after expressing misgivings about it, according to the current and former employees. [...]

"Several Facebook employees discovered that they do, in fact, have ethics, claim anonymous sources."

Some analysts have said Facebook's best option is to follow a model laid out by other internet companies and cooperate with a local company or investor. Finding a partner -- and potentially allowing it to own a majority stake in Facebook's China operation -- would take the burden of censorship and surveillance off the Silicon Valley company. It would also let Facebook rely on a local company's government connections and experience to deal with the difficult task of communicating with Beijing.

"When an American company wants to cave to the demands of a foreign totalitarian regime, it always plays better in the media to do so through a shell company."

Facebook's descent into the rabbit hole of censorship is suicidal:

But the intent here is the real problem. In the first place, it shows a decidedly broken moral compass. You know how they keep telling us that open and free trade and relations with totalitarian countries will someday soon lead to more freedom in those countries as its people become more and more exposed to our way of life?

All of that goes out the window when the businesses and politicians trading and dealing with those countries agree to censor the things that make free society free in the first place. Facebook is guilty of this every time it agrees to erase even the evidence of American political free speech with censorship. Politicians are guilty of this every time a female American envoy agrees to ignore our firm belief in religious pluralism by donning a hijab when visiting even non-religious sites in a Muslim country. The list goes on, but the exchange of free ideas and principles is killed by these kinds of unjustified concessions and they destroy the very best reasons for international relations.

Hey, remember when Twitter pulled this same shit and nobody cared?

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

This drives me crazy.

The very top section of your community is the first thing every member sees every time they visit your community. This is the most valuable real-estate your community has to offer.

You need to fill this section with the most valuable action that members can take right now.

For most communities, this is a search box. Members begin typing a question and find the solution (or ask a question).

For others, it might be the latest discussions. Or it might be a prompt to ask a question or answer unanswered questions. Or it might be featuring a member. Or you might have the latest upcoming event or recent community creation.

Whatever you fill this with, make sure it’s not a static, useless, graphic that has no impact upon members.

Many communities (like this one) are a valuable information and support. They can change the lives of their members and support them in moments of critical need. Make sure you are tilting the scales entirely on helping as many of your members get the support they need as quickly as possible.

Don’t waste your best space.

p.s. If your community covers a sensitive topic, feature discussions on sensitive topics at the top to ensure every newcomer knows this is the place where they can ask sensitive questions.

Reply to this post

 

 

 

 

 

I think Apple earns between 64%-68% of industry profits, not 91%. 

• I believe the notion that Apple makes almost all the profits in the mobile phone industry is not accurate because Apple’s handset margins are underpinned by both hardware and its ecosystem.
• Strategy Analytics has analysed the profits of the global handset makers and concluded that of the $9.4bn in industry profits in Q3 16A, Apple accounts for 91% of them (see here)
• To get the real picture, I think one must either separate the ecosystem from the hardware or include companies like Google which has effectively drained the Android industry of its profitability.

Separate ecosystem from hardware.

• In order to do this, one has estimate what margins Apple would make if iOS did not exist and it was merely a handset vendor selling Android devices.
• In Q3 16A Apple sold 45.5m devices with an ASP of $625 giving revenues of $28.44bn and EBIT of $8.5bn giving an EBIT margin of 29.9%.
• If Apple was selling Android devices, I suspect that its gross margin would be around 20% and its EBIT margin 4-5%.
• This leads me to believe that in Q3 16A Apple made $1.4bn in profits from hardware and $7.1bn from its ecosystem.
• This is a fairer comparison to the other handset makers who don’t have an ecosystem and using Strategy Analytics’ numbers would lead me to include that hardware profits of the industry were $2.2bn of which Apple earned 64% and the Android handset makers 36%.
• It is important to note that Samsung’s dreadful Q3 16A due to the Note 7 has substantially skewed the current numbers in Apple’s favour.

Include the ecosystem.

• I have long believed that the real difference between Apple and Google is much less than many commentators believe.
• Both companies own global ecosystems from which they derive most of their profits.
• However, they monetise them in different ways (hardware for Apple, advertising for Google).
• Consequently, to compare oranges to oranges, one must include the profit that Google generates from mobile devices to get a real picture what is happening in the industry.
• I have excluded the Chinese ecosystems from this analysis for reasons of simplicity and the fact they only operate in China.
• In Q3 16A, RFM estimates that Google generated $7.8bn in revenues from mobile devices upon which it made margins of at least 40%.
• This means that the mobile ecosystem generated $3.1bn in profits for Google which I have long believed comes at the expense of the Android handset industry.
• This means that hardware and ecosystem profits (adjusting SA’s numbers) in total were $12.5bn of which Apple earned 68%, Google 25%, leaving the Android handset makers with just 7%.

Take Home Message.

• Whichever way one cuts the cake, comparing oranges to oranges or lemons to lemons, the end conclusion is the same:
• Apple earns the majority of the industry’s profits but it is not the huge 91% that a simple calculation indicates.
• Furthermore, the re-addition of Samsung into the mix once it has got back on its feet after the Note 7 disaster will further reduce Apple’s real share of industry profits.
• I expect that as time passes, more and more of the profits of the consumer device industry will be made by those that have ecosystems at the expense of those that do not.

Kannan, Kaufman, Karach, et al., The Morning Paper, Nov 27, 2016

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You need to think of this paper as the first tentative explorations of a complex topic. Could your email answer itself for you? In a sense, a spam filter is the first attempt at such, where the response is 'no response, delete and block'. But what about actually sending a response, for example, a response to a meeting invitation? In theory, it sounds simple - identify the time of the meeting, check your availability for tomorrow, then respond appropriately and book. But how to respond? You want to match the tone of the invitation. Otherwise it looks like a machine responded. And if the request was to attend a meeting "tomorrow", w hat day is that exactly?

[Link] [Comment]

James Gleick, Big Think, Nov 27, 2016

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I likw Big Think, but I wish the articles were more substantial, not just advertisements for books. So this post on the nature of time fails to satisfy. Fortunately there is ample literature on the reality of time. If you have a lot, then you'd want to work on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hawking's Brief History. But if you have less, and still want to be mystified, your best bet is J.E. McTaggart's The Unreality of Time. Time may be a necessary condition for the possibility of perception, as Kant would say, but it is at the same time a subjective experience.

 

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Growing up in the country, one of my favorite pastimes was riding my bike on the wrap-around porch, going down ramps, learning how to stand on my seat and go over homemade jumps, etc. That love of bike rides continued through high school and into my marriage to Marty. Once we started having babies though, I had to hang up my bike (literally), and it was clear that with 2,3 and then 4 kids under 4, riding bikes together was a thing of the past. Fast forward to this year with 5 young children, and enter the Madsen Cycle. The kids and I, along with my sister had the great pleasure of meeting Jared and Lisa Madsen earlier this year. Hearing their story, and getting a tour of their incredible shop where they put together and packaged every Madsen cargo bike was inspiring, and also felt like I was visiting old friends. I've never seen another bike like this on the market before, and I was just awed by their vision and the amount of thought and passion they've poured into their business.

I drove home that day with this big black beauty strapped in the back of the pick-up, and immediately unpacked it and loaded up all the kiddies for our first bike ride altogether.

It felt wonderful.

Check out Emily Meyers - from The Freckled Fox - on her MADSEN bike!

Brooke Donald-Stanford, Futurity, Nov 27, 2016

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I've seen this story in various forms over the last few days. It's a natural follow-up to the meme that fake news swayed the U.S. election. There's just one problem with this line of thinking. Young people aren't the ones actually falling for fake news. If they were, they would have been the ones voting for Trump (and for Brexit, etc. etc.). According to exit polls, older white men voted for Trump. These are people far more likely to have gained their views watching or reading traditional media rather than online media. The same traditional media that gave Trump  an estimated $2 billion in free publicity. So, yeah - Facebook is far from perfect. But they are  not the ones to blame for fake news.  These people are.

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Q: While financially it is affordable, I simply do not have the space in my home to house your best TV pick, the 65-inch Vizio P65-C1. With that being said, is it generally okay to stick with the same model family of television and expect the same type of quality from that television in a different size? For example, I may not be able to fit the P65-C1 in my home but would love to purchase the P55-C1, which is in the same model family but ten inches smaller.

With a media who failed to hold jokers to account when they had their chance, preferring “balanced” reporting that biases news reports and gives equal measure to unequally validated ideas, and social media opting for truthiness rather than fact to generate momentum for spreading (fake) news, it seems we’re told by commentators we’re now in a “post-truth”/”post-factual” world.

As the OED define it, truthiness is The quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.

Although the definition could be debated…

Sound familiar?

A few years ago, at the dawn of the age of Big Data, the idea that segmenting and modelling large datasets in a “theory-free” way (Big data and the end of theory?) perhaps gave an inkling that truthiness was on its way in, big time. (Compare this also with anti-expert rhetoric over the last couple of years. I’m all for slamming certain classes of academic outlook and activity, but I also think there are reasons for trusting certain sorts of claims more than others…)

The fact that data processing algorithms are likely to have ever increasing power of what we read – not only in terms of selecting which stories to show us in our personalised news feeds, but also because other machines may themselves have written the stories we’re reading – means that we need to start getting a feel for what sorts of biases are likely to be baked into these algorithms.

In contrast to earlier generation of rile based expert systems that could be asked to “explain” their reasoning, today’s systems are often black box statistical machines. Whereas rule based systems used logical reasoning to come up with answers, Deep Learning algorithms and their ilk have gut reactions: rule based expert systems reasoned towards a truth associated with the logical statements asserted into them in an explainable way; black boxes have gut reactions and deal in truthiness.

But whereas we might be suspicious about a person making a truthy claim (“that doesn’t sound quite right to me…”) once we start to trust machine – because they appear to be right-ish, most of the time – we start to over-trust them. I think – I haven’t checked. Sounds truthy to me…

So with a tech news report doing the rounds at the moment that a “Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces”, it seems that the paper authors “have demonstrated that via supervised machine learning, data-driven face classifiers are able to make reliable inference on criminality” as well as identifying “a law of normality for faces of noncriminals. After controlled for race, gender and age, the general law-biding public have facial appearances that vary in a significantly lesser degree than criminals”. (It’s not hard to imagine this being used a ranking factor for something…) The (best) false positive rate looked on one of the charts (figure 4 in the paper) to be around 6%. Are the decisions “true”, then, or just “truthy”? What level of false positivity makes the difference? (Bear in mind behaviourist training  – partial reinforcement can be really powerful…) I also wonder if the researchers ran the same training schedule against IQ? Or etc etc

(In passing, another recent preprint report on arXiv – Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild reports on an automated lip reading system trained on several hours of people talking on BBC television (the UK based researchers were license fee payers, I suspect, but the Google Deepmind sponsor..?!) (If you’d rather read a pop sci write up, New Scientist has one here: Google’s DeepMind AI can lip-read TV shows better than a pro.) For reference, the best word error rate the researchers report is 3.3%. So are the outputs true or truthy?)

So… I’m wondering… algorithmic truthiness: the extent to which the outputs of an algorithm feel as if they could be true, even if not necessarily true. … a useful conceit, or not?

Or maybe we need an alt definition, such as “The extent to which you believe the output of an algorithm to be true rather than what you know to be true”?!

Images via

This article was originally published on November 24, 2014 but we think it still rocks!

Mood rings have been must-haves since they were introduced in the 70s, but their accuracy has always been, well, questionable. Thankfully, Finnish design company Moodmetric has been hard at work refashioning them into wearable devices, swapping out their temperature-sensitive liquid crystals for a mood tracking smartphone app / biometric sensor combo.

The idea is that the device can isolate specific emotions, letting you know if you've been angry or stressed. "By naming those feelings, Moodmetric allows people to get to know themselves better," Niina Venho, COO of Moodmetric, told International Business Times UK. Designed by silversmith Vesa Nilsson, the ring measures the way your skin changes based on autonomous neurological activity. It interprets the data it gathers as emotional information, then logs it, kind of like a FitBit for your emotions.

The Moodmetric app also comes with meditation aides and other programs to help you keep your cool and take control of emotions. To that end, it's the perfect gift to make sure everyone stays calm this holiday season. 

Visit Moodmetric's website for more information on the wearable device.

h/t Internaltional Business Times UK

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