Drewbot

"Ah the 90’s, when technology fueled economies but didn’t disrupt them and the only..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:59:01 -0500

“Ah the 90’s, when technology fueled economies but didn’t disrupt them and the only government we had to fear was our own (and only then, it was just the parts hiding the aliens from us).”

"One of the goals we had in designing our letter distribution was to give players letters that would..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:31:38 -0500

““One of the goals we had in designing our letter distribution was to give players letters that would allow them to form words much more easily than in other word games,” Holme said via e-mail. “In [Words with Friends], we put four Hs into the bag and set their value to 3—a big difference from Scrabble, which uses two Hs worth 4 points.” … In other words, he amplified the number of what Bettner calls the game’s “explosive moments.”

- IEEE Spectrum on Words with Friends, explaining why I put up with EA’s horrible, official Scrabble app instead of using Words with Friends. (Scrabble doesn’t need explosive moments and easy words. Many, if not most, games are better not being ‘optimized’.)

"He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kinds of parties you’re not..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:01:23 -0500

“He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kinds of parties you’re not always dressed, and I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman.”

- Henri Leclerc, a lawyer for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whom has been detained for questioning regarding a prostitution ring alledgedly opperating in France and Belgium.

Nick Kam comments, “The French are unabashed caricatures of themselves.” (Via NYT)

From The: "Um, What?!" Department

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:45:00 -0500

parislemon:

Google now asks you to enter your credit card as part of the Gmail signup flow. Bold. twitter.com/rmatei/status/…
— Robert Cezar Matei (@rmatei) February 22, 2012

This is going to go over well.

Sure Google, why not continue to saddle your best products with your flailing ones? Rather than improve G+ or Wallet so people want to use them, plant them as roadblocks ahead of search and mail. I’m sure this will work out.

Ben Goldacre reminds us that the primary goal of data...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:41:00 -0500

Ben Goldacre reminds us that the primary goal of data visualization is to effectively communicate a message. Being a pretty poster is a nice-to-have.

As a not-very-good piano player, it is enormously comforting to...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:32:00 -0500

As a not-very-good piano player, it is enormously comforting to discover Neko Case’s piano is blue-taped to a G# scale.

In the desert of the United Arab Emirates, there is an...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:03:00 -0500

In the desert of the United Arab Emirates, there is an unusual series of flat discs imprinted in the sand. Each one is about 40 centimetres wide, and they snake off into the distance in several parallel lines, for hundreds of metres.

They are tracks. They were made by a herd of at least 14 early elephants, marching across the land between 6 and 8 million years ago. The track-makers are long dead, but in the intervening time, nothing has buried their tracks or eroded them away. Today, their social lives are still recorded in their fossilised footsteps.

The site, known as Mleisa 1, provides the oldest evidence for proboscideans – elephants and their close relatives – living in a herd. Covering the area of seven football fields, it’s also probably the largest fossil trackway ever discovered, for any animal. When these beasts strolled across the landscape, the entire area would have been cut through by a river system. Rather than the dry sand of today, it would have been lush and green.

“It’s really an amazing site,” says Brian Kraatz from the Western University of Health Sciences, who was involved in the study. “I wish we had the ability to transport people there so they can stand in the middle of it at sunset. You can’t help but find yourself looking around to see if you can catch a last glimpse of the herd trotting off.”

(Via Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Crisp: JSON Pretty Print formatting in BBEdit

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:56:19 -0500

Crisp: JSON Pretty Print formatting in BBEdit:

A pretty print filter for BBEdit that just made my day much, much easier.

"Nuclear power supplies three-fourths of France’s electricity, yet in one poll 57% of French..."

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:31:36 -0500

“Nuclear power supplies three-fourths of France’s electricity, yet in one poll 57% of French respondents favoured abandoning it.”

- The Economist

Replacing Torture with Journalism & Data Science

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:00:30 -0500

Replacing Torture with Journalism & Data Science:

Wired’s Danger Room interviews Marc Ambinder, a former reporter for The Atlantic and National Journal, who’s just written a book on JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command. The whole interview is fascinating.

Here, Ambinder describes JSOC’s intelligence gathering tactics, which take a page from journalism, detective work, and data science:

DR: What were some of the intelligence tactics that JSOC would use?

MA: Some of the tactics were as simple as equipping your tier-one operators — i.e., a Delta Force shooter or a SEAL Team Six demolition expert, the elite of the elite — with a camera. Instead of rounding up insurgents, bringing them to one area of a house, they’d have pictures of them exactly where they are, and take pictures what they have on them exactly. They’d keep them with their pocket litter until they were processed. And they’d send pictures back in real time to an intelligence fusion center. The main one in Iraq was in Balad but there were others. And you’d have analyst who could use many of various databases that JSOC had access to, and many that JSOC was building. The common metaphor was that you’re building the airplane as it’s taking off. You built all these databases for intelligence and had secret biometrics processes. There were teams of U.S. intelligence officers who were trying to get as many fingerprints, DNA samples and so forth of anyone in Baghdad as they could. The analysts would be able to create link analysis charts from them.

If you captured Abu So-and-So, you’d be able to say within a minute, “Hey, I know your uncle is this person, who we really want to get to. If you can tell me where this person is right now, we’ll give you a break and even let you go.” And often, that would be what Abu So-and-So would do, because it would be in his best interest. Within maybe 20 minutes, JSOC could launch a second raid targeting the uncle of Abu So-and-So.

Such methods have thankfully replaced several forms of torture.

The Problem isn't Browser Exploits, it's that Users Have No Idea What's Happening With Their Data

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:31:00 -0500

Microsoft: Hey Google, you're breaking our browser's privacy settings and getting more data because of it. Cut it out.
Google: A bunch of academics say your privacy settings were already broken. (Plus, Facebook's doing it too).
Facebook: Oh hi Microsoft, your browser is old so we thought nobody would notice.
Internet Explorer Users: What the hell is going on?

"When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a condition for further..."

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:06:58 -0500

“When Wolfgang Schäuble proposed that Greece should postpone its elections as a condition for further help, I knew that the game would soon be up. We are at the point where success is no longer compatible with democracy. The German finance minister wants to prevent a “wrong” democratic choice. Similar to this is the suggestion to let the elections go ahead, but to have a grand coalition irrespective of the outcome. The eurozone wants to impose its choice of government on Greece – the eurozone’s first colony.”

- Wolfgang Münchau says Greece must default if it wants democracy. When an FT columnist calls a German-led bailout “unethical” and an attempt to “insulate the government from the outcome of democratic processes”, we should probably take note.

Münchau reasons that German moves are part of an effort to encourage Greek’s exit from the Euro:

Mistrust is the reason why the Greek rescue package has been delayed until the latest possible moment, and why the latest proposals contain so many poison pills: implementation deadlines, the escrow account, and a permanent representation of creditors and the International Monetary Fund. Soon there will be yet more austerity. At some point, somebody will snap.

The German strategy seems to be to make life so unbearable that the Greeks themselves will want to leave the eurozone.

(Via The FT)

"Greece is now officially a ward of the international community. It has no real independence when it..."

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:52:00 -0500

“Greece is now officially a ward of the international community. It has no real independence when it comes to fiscal policy any more, and if everything goes according to plan, it’s not going to have any independence for many, many years to come.”

- Felix Salmon deftly breaks down the Greek bailout deal. The downside scenarios put forth by the Eurozone are incredibility optimistic, yet still are weak enough that Greece won’t be able to borrow from private market for years to come.

He’s not optimistic:

More to the point, the plan assumes that Greece’s politicians will stick to what they’ve agreed, and start selling off huge chunks of their country’s patrimony while at the same time imposing enormous budget cuts. Needless to say, there is no indication that Greece’s politicians are willing or able to do this, nor that Greece’s population will put up with such a thing. It could easily all fall apart within months; the chances of it gliding to success and a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio in 2020 have got to be de minimis.

Europe’s politicians know this, of course. But at the very least they’re buying time: this deal might well delay catastrophic capital flight from Greece, and give the Europeans more time to work out how to shore up Portugal if and when that happens. Will they make good use of the time that they’re buying? I hope so. Because once the Greek domino falls, it’s going to take a huge amount of money, statesmanship, and luck to prevent further dominoes from toppling.

Simply put, this plan alone isn’t sustainable. Europe will stabilize after Greece exits the Euro, not before.

Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying That Stars Die

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:23:00 -0500

Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying That Stars Die:

parislemon:

It seems like Hollywood is eyeing two business models in order to preserve their precious DVD sales (which are tanking more each day):

1) Make it basically impossible to rent a film. It used to be that you could rent a movie the day it came out for sale on DVD. Then it was 30 days later. Now it’s 56 days later. And you can’t even think about renting the films for 28 days.

As a reminder, torrents currently have no such window.

2) Hope and pray that big time stars die to temporarily boost sales. And instead of doing everything in you power to ensure that fans have easy access to remember the stars they cherished, pull all access except for the most expensive and limited variety in order to maximize profits.

Don’t forget:

3) Rehashing our old properties to death (pun not intended) rather than invest in new development

4) Suing or attempting to legislate away all engagement with said properties except the ones most lucrative to Hollywood, no matter how irrelevant they are to our audiences

Hollywood’s media formats, properties, and stars are dying and they refuse to create a business based off anything else. This will end well.

The Economist: Why Jeremy Lin Matters in China

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:06:50 -0500

The Economist: Why Jeremy Lin Matters in China:

One of the reasons I love the Economist is their news cycle duration: a weekly rhythm allows them to absorb and then thoughtfully weigh in on viral subjects, which tend to carry lots of noise as they emerge. This piece on Jeremy Lin is a prime example:

Mr Lin has quickly amassed a huge following among Chinese basketball fans (and this country does love basketball). This poses a bit of a conundrum for Chinese authorities for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that Mr Lin is an American who is proudly of Taiwanese descent, which would seem to complicate China’s efforts to claim him (and oh how they have tried already—on which, more below).

But there are three other reasons Mr Lin’s stardom could fluster the authorities. First, he is very openly Christian, and the Communist Party is deeply wary of the deeply religious (notably on those within its own ranks). Second, he is not a big centre or forward, the varietals which are the chief mainland Chinese export to the NBA, including the Mavericks’ Mr Yi; and of course he came out of nowhere to become a star, having been educated at the most prestigious university in America, Harvard.

Mr Lin is, put plainly, precisely everything that China’s state sport system cannot possibly produce.

The whole thing is a great read, especially when paired with the Economist’s previous piece on China’s failure to field a decent football team.

Building a Coffin for Mobile Ad Revenues

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:02:02 -0500

Building a Coffin for Mobile Ad Revenues:

interactioned:

Google’s mobile revenue problem just got harder to solve. As Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries reported in the Wall Street Journal:

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

This is all being spun as here Google goes again, doing something “evil”. But the real issue is how it affects their bottom line. Mobile advertising companies are fucked if they’re not able to track users the way that they’ve been doing on the desktop. It makes it much harder to do behavioral ad targeting and will likely make click-through rates decline. But, as John Battelle points out, it’s not like Google was doing anything different from what companies have been doing in desktop browsers:

In short, Apple’s mobile version of Safari broke with common web practice, and as a result, it broke Google’s normal approach to engaging with consumers. Was Google’s “normal approach” wrong? Well, I suppose that’s a debate worth having – it’s currently standard practice and the backbone of the entire web advertising ecosystem – but the Journal doesn’t bother to go into those details. One can debate whether setting cookies should happen by default – but the fact is, that’s how it’s done on the open web.

Anyone else find it weird that tracking your every move as much as possible is “common web practice” and became the de facto standard for the “open web”?

“Don’t get upset about Path, this is standard practice!” “Psh, Google’s just doing what it does all the time on the desktop anyway.”

I vote that the ‘business as usual’ or ‘standard practice’ defense can only be used if your users can explain what you’re actually doing. If they can’t, you’re not lying but you’re certainly omitting or couching the truth.

"However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising..."

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:58:00 -0500

“However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”

- Rachel Whetstone, Senior Vice president of Communications and Public Policy at Google, respond’s to the WSJ’s report claiming Google has been bypassing Safari’s third-party cookie restrictions.

This statement would be comforting if she had detailed what information these cookies are collecting. I’d wager “personal information” in this context refers to demographic information but doesn’t cover behavioral or search data. Please clarify, Google.

140 Characters Go Farther in China

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:09:10 -0500

James Fallows, covering Jeremy Lin’s reception in China, quotes a tweet:

On Feb. 12, Mao Maozi, a cameraman with the state-run Shanghai Education Television network, tweeted an answer to that question on Sina Weibo: “If Jeremy Lin lived on the mainland, he would either be a semi-literate CBA [Chinese Basketball Association, China’s state-run professional league] player or an ordinary undergraduate who likes basketball in his spare time. We admire him not because he is an ethnic Chinese, but because he has proved for a fact that the main reason that Chinese don’t play basketball well is because of the system, and not their physique!”

And, Yes, for the record, that’s all one tweet! The writing system of the Chinese language has its drawbacks, but one of the pluses is that with 140 characters you can say a whole lot more in Chinese.

I’m really enjoying the linguistic quirks and negotiations as exported technology encounters methods of communication which their interfaces never thought to consider. China is nearly always a participant, as it’s scale cannot be ignored. As more and more locally designed tech is exported and more and more Chinese citizens explore the bounds of the web, the friction and workarounds will be fascinating to watch. The Economist notes:

More than 300m Chinese internet users have at least one microblog account, and some use virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around the infamous “great firewall” of China. The Chinese government is being dragged, click by click, out of its cone of silence.

(Fallows via Matt Yglesias)

Ebooks made with curated Instapaper folders are the new mixtapes.

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:13:38 -0500

Ebooks made with curated Instapaper folders are the new mixtapes.

Desperation: Groupon Tests $30 “Groupon VIP” Service

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:24:00 -0500

Desperation: Groupon Tests $30 “Groupon VIP” Service:

From PandoTicker:

In an e-mail sent to a limited batch of “Groupon addicts” this morning, Groupon outlined the features of the $30-per-year plan: early access to deals, access to expired/sold out deals, and the ability to refund Groupons even after they’ve expired.

I wonder if this will work as well as the $600 TiVo and premium-priced BlackBerrys.