Junyu's Recommendations

Why Silver Lake and Elliott Are the Wild Cards in the Twitter Takeover Battle

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 03:33:54 +0800

The last time Twitter was under shareholder assault, from activist investor Elliott Management in 2020, Silver Lake CEO Egon Durban called Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey offering to help, according to a person familiar with the situation. Twitter accepted the outreach: Silver Lake invested $1 billion in Twitter and got a board seat, in a move unveiled as part of a broader peace deal in which Elliott also got a board seat.

In other words, Silver Lake was Twitter’s white knight. That was certainly the view of Twitter shareholder Orlando Police Pension Fund, which alleged in a lawsuit filed last year that Twitter did the deal with Silver Lake “to protect themselves from a high-profile proxy contest” with Elliott. Now the question is whether Twitter can find another white knight to defuse its latest crisis by buying out Elon Musk.

Source: https://ift.tt/cFAxi9B

What is going on with Elon Musk and Twitter?

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 02:33:36 +0800

Illustration by Alex Castro

Here’s everything we know

It has been a busy week for Elon Musk and Twitter.

Last Tuesday, Elon Musk filed documents showing he had spent $2.8 billion to take a 9 percent stake in Twitter, becoming the company’s largest individual shareholder. Shortly afterward, Twitter announced he would be taking a seat on the company’s board. The stock price jumped more than 20 percent on the news of Musk’s stake, and everyone involved with the company started to ponder how his involvement would change things.

Four days later, the deal for the board seat fell through. In an open letter to Twitter staff on Sunday night, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shared that Musk had backed out the previous day. There was little explanation for the last-minute shift, but some time between Tuesday and Saturday, whatever arrangement led to Musk joining the board had unraveled.

So, what on earth is going on here? We don’t have an answer for you, but we’ve laid out everything we know about the situation, organized around the five big questions we are still trying to answer.

Why didn’t Elon join the board?

It’s weird! Our best view of the situation comes from Agrawal’s statement Sunday night, but the statement is purposefully vague, giving few specifics (“Elon shared… that he will no longer be joining the board”) and heavily hinting that there is more to the story (“here’s what I can share about what happened”).

Because Twitter is a publicly traded company, Agrawal was under pressure to make some kind of statement before markets opened on Monday. The news that Musk had joined the board had sent Twitter stock shooting up in value, so any delay in sharing the news that he was leaving could spark insider trading concerns. (Twitter even made a formal SEC filing to go along with the CEO’s statement, just to be sure everyone got the message.) But Agrawal wasn’t saying any more than he absolutely had to say.

Elon’s side of the story is also murky. The best clue we have is a parallel SEC filing where he lays out his new obligations as a major shareholder, explicitly saying that he “may express his views to the Board… through social media or other channels.” In short, he’s allowed to keep complaining about Twitter on Twitter, which may have conflicted with his fiduciary duties as a board member. Protocol correspondent Issie Lapowsky flagged a recently fav’d tweet from Musk saying, “Elon became largest shareholder for Free Speech… Elon was told to play nice and not speak freely.”

What’s up with the background check?

In the note, Agrawal says Elon’s initial appointment was “contingent on a background check and formal acceptance.” With no other explanation handy, some observers have read this as a suggestion that the background check turned up some information that disqualified Musk as a board member, which would also explain why everything happened so abruptly and with so little explanation. It’s hard to imagine what the check would have found, but it would have to be something juicy. Maybe Musk is planning to launch a Twitter competitor? Maybe he has Dick Costolo chained up in his basement!

Musk is one of the most closely scrutinized public figures in the world, so it’s hard to imagine anything too wild staying hidden for long — but we did find out he had a secret child last month, so anything’s possible.

Or… maybe it’s nothing. The other way to read the line is that Agrawal was trying to address some potential embarrassment around Tuesday’s announcement, which made it seem all but certain that Musk would be on the board in a few days’ time. Emphasizing the background check definitely made it seem like Musk had some deep dark secret, but that’s the kind of subtle political misstep you might expect from a technically oriented CEO who’s only been on the job for six months.

What were Twitter employees worried about?

It doesn’t seem like Twitter employees were wild about Musk joining the company board, and many of them are breathing a sigh of relief now that he’s gone. One team lead even responded to Agrawal’s tweet with a sigh of relief, saying, “I’ve kept quiet since the announcement because I wanted to give Twitter leadership a chance to do right by its employees, and they did. Thank you.”

This suggests another interpretation of events, in which Agrawal quietly scuttled the deal once it became clear what a liability Musk would be on the board. Remember Agrawal’s note was originally sent to Twitter employees, and if you read it as efforts to calm an unhappy workforce, the chilly tone makes a lot more sense. This theory has a lot more loose ends than the Musk-centric theories (for one, it’s not clear what Agrawal could do to sink the offer in less than a week), but it’s worth considering.

Many on the American right wing have treated Musk’s board seat as a win for conservatives, a chance to get revenge on the company for banning Donald Trump in 2020 (among other moderation grievances). If rank-and-file Twitter employees took those comments seriously, it’s easy to see why they’d be nervous.

There’s no immediate evidence that Musk bought his stake in the company to settle some kind of culture-war grievance, but that only raises an even larger question…

What does Elon want from Twitter?

This is the core question that’s been building since the news of Elon’s billion-dollar stock buy broke last week. We still don’t really know why Elon bought such a large stake in Twitter or what he wants from the company. If he just wanted a say in how Twitter manages its platform, then board membership makes sense. But being a board member also comes with restrictions — there are limitations on how much stock Musk can own and what he can say, springing from a broader duty to act in the best interests of shareholders. If he wanted to muscle the company into a radically different moderation approach, then the restrictions of board membership could have outweighed the benefits.

The question is particularly urgent if Musk simply wants to take over Twitter entirely. Any time a rich person buys a significant stake in a company, there’s always a risk of a hostile takeover — and with Jack Dorsey out and activist investors turning up the heat, Twitter is particularly vulnerable. Musk is no stranger to this kind of financial power play, from his contentious relationship with Tesla’s founders to Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity. And in strictly financial terms, he has enough money to buy the company six times over. If he wants to take over, he can probably do it.

There are important material reasons why Musk might not want to do this. He’s already CEO of two companies and in leadership roles at three more. Twitter doesn’t fit with his usual brand of ambitious engineering projects, and it’s not a particularly safe bet financially. Musk’s public statements through the whole affair have been so chaotic that it’s hard to say what his plan is or if he even has one. The same day the board membership fell through, Musk was tweeting that the company headquarters should be converted to a homeless shelter. The next day, he said the company should “delete the w in Twitter.” (Both tweets have since been deleted.) In public, he seems more interested in tweeting than running the company — but it’s hard to be sure.

What happens next?

Elon isn’t joining Twitter’s board, but with a 9 percent stake in the company, he’s still going to be a massively powerful voice in its future. The fact that he’s not on the board means he’s likely to exercise that power in public, whether through more financial moves or more heated criticism of the company’s choices. As Musk’s ongoing war with the SEC shows, he’s not shy about public statements that will produce wild swings in the value of a company. If he left the last week feeling put out, he’ll have lots of chances to even the score.

Source: https://ift.tt/dFEVnzr

#41. Solidarity with Ukraine in Feb 2022

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:33:46 +0800

TLDR: Russo-Ukrainian War. Open Startup page. 100 posts about products. 100 Fixed Bugs. Flashback: #40. Concentrating in January 202…

Source: https://ift.tt/8fCEPLQ

Apex Legends Mobile will be available in 10 countries next week

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 02:33:56 +0800

The game is getting a limited regional launch | Image: EA

Apex Legends Mobile will soon be available in more countries. The game first debuted in a closed beta last year that was available in a few countries, but starting next week, the game will be available in a “limited regional launch” as a free download in 10 countries on iOS and Android.

People in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia will all be able to download Apex Legends Mobile, according to a post on Respawn’s website. The game was also available in India during the closed beta, but it’s not on the list for the limited regional launch, and we’ve asked EA / Respawn for comment as to why that might be.

Image: EA

Here’s a screenshot of the game from 2021.

Respawn didn’t specify when Apex Legends Mobile might come out in more places. “We’ll be sharing updates on global launch once we’ve made informed decisions coming out of the limited regional launch,” Respawn said. “If you’re in one of the participating test countries, pre-registration is now open. We’re still actively testing the app around the world, and we can’t wait for more players to join the fun at launch!”

If you want to see if your phone is compatible, check out the requirements on Respawn’s FAQ. The game is built “specifically for mobile,” so you won’t be able to play with the console or PC versions of the game.

Mobile-focused takes on hit console or PC games have proven to be very popular; PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Mobile were two of the top App Store downloads in January, according to Sensor Tower data. They can also be quite lucrative. Riot Games’ League of Legends: Wild Rift has generated more than $150 million in consumer spending, reports data.ai (formerly App Annie), while Call of Duty: Mobile has surpassed an astonishing $1.5 billion in player spending, Sensor Tower says.

Apex Legends Mobile isn’t EA’s only big bet on a mobile shooter — the company is also working on a Battlefield mobile game that is in early playtests.

Source: https://ift.tt/nofTNPR

Facing Hostile Chinese Authorities, Apple CEO Signed $275 Billion Deal With Them

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 00:33:38 +0800

Apple’s iPhone recently became the top-selling smartphone in China, its second-biggest market after the U.S., for the first time in six years. But the company owes much of that success to CEO Tim Cook, who laid the foundation years ago by secretly signing an agreement, estimated to be worth more than $275 billion, with Chinese officials promising Apple would do its part to develop China’s economy and technological prowess through investments, business deals and worker training.

Cook forged the five-year agreement, which hasn’t been previously reported, during the first of a series of in-person visits he made to the country in 2016 to quash a sudden burst of regulatory actions against Apple’s business, according to internal Apple documents viewed by The Information. Before the meetings, Apple executives were scrambling to salvage the company’s relationship with Chinese officials, who believed the company wasn’t contributing enough to the local economy, the documents show. Amid the government crackdown and the bad publicity that accompanied it, iPhone sales plummeted.

Source: https://ift.tt/31Askmu

What you mostly see in a cat

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 23:33:18 +0800

Source: https://ift.tt/3nHYRzc

The remastered GTA Trilogy is back on PC

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:34:10 +0800

Rockstar Games

After a delay lasting around 72 hours, Rockstar Games finally made Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition playable and purchasable again on PC.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition is again available through the Rockstar Games Launcher for play and purchase. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to improve and update overall performance as we move forward: https://t.co/hAfEKqYS3o
— Rockstar Support (@RockstarSupport) November 15, 2021

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and are working to improve and update overall performance as we move forward,” Rockstar said in a tweet.

The Trilogy, which includes remastered versions of GTA III, GTA Vice City, and GTA San Andreas, was only accessible on PC during a brief window on its botched November 11th launch date. The Rockstar Games Launcher went down that same day, preventing anyone from playing the GTA bundle on PC (or any other Rockstar games, for that matter). Rockstar brought the Launcher back online on November 12th but noted that GTA: The Trilogy was unavailable to buy or play because Rockstar had to delete files that were “unintentionally included in these versions.”

Regarding which files were removed, it might’ve had something to do with unlicensed music files and the “Hot Coffee” minigame. Video Games Chronicle (VGC) reports that data miners uncovered code in the remastered edition for the notorious Hot Coffee sex minigame that players could only access via a mod in the original version of GTA San Andreas.

Despite this, the Federal Trade Commission charged Rockstar and Take-Two at the time for allegedly deceiving the ESRB — GTA San Andreas was originally rated Mature, but the explicit Hot Coffee minigame would raise that rating to Adults Only. Rockstar released an M-rated version of San Andreas without the minigame but ended up losing $24 million after stores took the AO version off their shelves.

Additionally, a separate report from VGC highlights data miners who claim they found the “holy grail” of developer notes in the remastered games, along with a trove of unlicensed music that developers left disabled. Any of this content could’ve been the files Rockstar rushed to remove.

Wtf is this? I asked for a refund, I expect a refund. Not an attempt at stalling for time in the hope that I’ll be happy I can play this broken mess again. pic.twitter.com/z6arNSpPFG
— Lee Rodger (@LRodger501) November 15, 2021

Now that The Trilogy is back on PC, Rockstar will have to address growing complaints about its performance and graphical issues. Some players were so disappointed in the bundle’s quality that they refunded it before it could even become playable again. And as you can see from the tweet above, Rockstar is annoyingly emailing some players who previously asked for refunds just to confirm that they really don’t want the games.

Even the entire r/grandtheftauto subreddit has gone dark to protest the muddy release of The Trilogy, as well as Rockstar’s removal of the original GTA trilogy from game stores like Steam. If you try to visit the subreddit, you’ll be met with this message:

Going dark to protest Rockstar/Take-Two taking down modders, pulling Trilogy PC version from paying customers, pulling ALL PC TITLES from paying customers for 30 hours, removing the original GTAs from sale (including ½/1969), letting Sony deny Trilogy refunds, No official statements. Please don’t blame modders for looking at files. Thank you to Grove Street Games for doing the best that you could. PC: https://ift.tt/30lP6gK

The problems players are experiencing with the games aren’t isolated to the PC version either — glitches and bugs are plaguing the remastered games across all platforms. Players are shocked at the appearance of some of the “remastered” characters and other graphical issues, such as one that causes blinding rainstorms. Rockstar says it’s working towards improving the game’s “overall performance” in the future, but it may already be too late.

Source: https://ift.tt/3Hn6Nxz

How New York overengineered its million-dollar vaccine passport

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 09:33:18 +0800

New York state launched the Excelsior Pass in March 2021. Above, concertgoers use the pass to attend a show on April 22, 2021, at The Shed in New York City. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

A key feature of the Excelsior Pass app is rarely used.

New York’s Excelsior Pass is getting more popular. Since it launched in March, the digital vaccine platform has issued millions of passes, which allow people to display proof of vaccination or negative test results via an app developed by the state. But not many businesses are using the Excelsior Pass’s signature feature: a scannable QR code that can quickly verify customers’ vaccination status by checking state records.

While New York state has issued 6 million total Excelsior Passes in the 29 weeks since launch, those passes have been scanned just over 314,000 times, the governor’s office told Recode on Thursday. That amounts to an average of about 10,800 scans per week. The app that businesses use to scan Excelsior Pass QR codes has been downloaded around 156,000 times.

New York, the first state to launch an app-based vaccine passport system, paid IBM millions of dollars to help build the Excelsior Pass platform. The system was designed to make reopening safer by providing businesses with a more secure way to confirm vaccination status than checking paper CDC cards, which are easily forged. But neither New York state nor New York City require businesses to scan the Excelsior Pass, and the low number of total scans suggests the Excelsior Pass is too complicated for its own good. Meanwhile, workers don’t have a strong incentive to prolong the process of checking people’s proof of vaccination when they already face harassment from customers angry about Covid-19 guidelines.

Recode first learned that statewide scanning activity was low between March and June after obtaining a report from the New York Office of Information Technology Services through a public records request. The governor’s office then shared the latest data, which showed a similar trend. The scanning figures also match up with anecdotal evidence from more than a dozen New Yorkers who spoke to Recode, all of whom have used the Excelsior Pass but said their QR codes are rarely or never scanned.

“I’ve been to a number of places, more than 10 times. Basically, every time I go out, they look at it, but there’s no scanning,” Bruna Martins, a marketing manager who lives in Manhattan, said. “They don’t even have a scanner.”

“They just sort of look at it. ‘Oh, hey, it’s on your phone. It exists, great.’ I’ve never had anyone scan the QR code,” said Matt Gross, a digital strategist based in Brooklyn.

While New Yorkers said the app was a convenient way to store proof of vaccination, they weren’t sure why the Excelsior Pass included a QR code. Some said they didn’t even know there was a separate scanning app.

How the Excelsior Pass is supposed to work

The Excelsior Pass system includes two apps: the NYS Excelsior Pass Wallet app, which customers use to store their Excelsior Passes, and the NYS Excelsior Pass Scanner app, which venues use to scan the passes’ QR codes.

New Yorkers can download their individual Excelsior Pass from the state government website by providing personal details such as their name and birthday. The site also asks for the type of vaccine the person received as well as the date of their most recent doses, after which the system cross-checks the information against a state-run immunization database. If everything checks out, the state issues the person an Excelsior Vaccination Pass, which displays their QR code, name, and birthday. There’s also a newer option to retrieve an Excelsior Pass Plus, which also shows the type of vaccine a person received and the date of their doses. The Excelsior Pass system also works with test results and verification systems in other states.

Restaurants, movie theaters, and other venues are supposed to download the NYS Excelsior Pass Scanner app to scan their customers’ passes. When this app scans a QR code, the technology checks to see whether the user’s vaccination information matches the state’s records and is still valid. The scanner app then displays an alert, like “valid,” “expired,” or “not found.” Businesses are also supposed to check that the name on someone’s pass matches their official state ID.

New York has advertised the Excelsior Pass system as an advanced tool that could help the state reopen safely and quickly. To build this system, New York’s Office of Business Information Services agreed to pay IBM an initial $2.5 million to build a state-specific version of the company’s existing blockchain-based Digital Health Pass technology. Depending on how many Excelsior Passes are downloaded over the next three years, however, IBM could earn up to $12.3 million more in licensing fees. Overall, the project could cost as much as $27 million, according to the New York Times. The IBM contract also stipulates that the Excelsior Pass technology could be repurposed for other tasks in the future, like confirming someone’s age or checking their driver’s license.

The Excelsior Pass is rarely scanned

Some Excelsior Pass users say they’re surprised when a venue asks to scan their app. Alina Butareva, a communications professional based in Brooklyn, told Recode that the Barclays Center is the only venue that’s ever scanned her Excelsior Pass. Martins, the marketing manager, said that her code has only been scanned by Pasquale Jones, an Italian restaurant.

The Excelsior Pass scans that do happen vary across a range of industries, according to state data. Sports venues accounted for 29 percent of scans between March and June, while food service businesses accounted for 23 percent and performing arts centers for 22 percent. The governor’s office would not share any additional data about which venues were scanning passes, citing the scanner app’s privacy policy.

Meanwhile, it’s service workers whohave the unpleasant job of enforcing New York City’s indoor vaccine mandate. While they can glance at a CDC card and driver’s license, using a new app and scanning QR codes could make the already taxing process of checking vaccine statuses more tedious. After all,these workers have faced abuse, violence, and sexual harassment when trying to enforce public health measures during the pandemic.

When asked about the scanner app’s limited usage, the architect of the Excelsior Pass program, Sandra Beattie, emphasized that venues have a choice when it comes to scanning the passes’ QR codes.

“As more strict measures have been put in place, we see scanning activity increase, but that scanning activity is up to the cooperation of individuals, no matter how you’re interacting,” Beattie, the first deputy director of the New York State Division of the Budget, told Recode. “The scanner is optional — recommended, not mandated.”

Leaving the verification piece out of the process is problematic, according to Siddarth Adukia, the technical director at the cybersecurity firm NCC Group.

“If you just look at the pass on a user’s device, that’s no guarantee that the user is actually vaccinated or the credential is genuine,” Adukia said. While he thought the scanning number seemed low, Adukia said it matched up with his own experience visiting venues in New York City.

Despite the low scanning numbers, New York is still trying to expand the Excelsior Pass system. The Excelsior Pass Plus can also be scanned anywhere that accepts SMART Health Cards, which are vaccine passes that adhere to a set of standards developed by the Vaccine Credential Institute. Smart Health Cards are currently being used by businesses in California, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Virginia. New York state also upgraded its Excelsior Pass Scanner app so that it can scan out-of-state SMART Health Cards, too.

While Excelsior Pass started out as a tool to help New York businesses recover from the pandemic, the state is now exploring how the platform could be retrofitted to verify other types of records and credentials. New York hasn’t decided exactly what the Excelsior Pass system could be used for next, but it is confident there’s a role for these apps in the future.

“Probably one of the biggest lessons learned coming out of the Covid environment [is] our experience with the digital vaccine credential, in that it’s accelerated our thinking about digital governments,” Beattie told Recode.

But if New York’s experience with Excelsior Pass is any indication, when faced with digital solutions, the government can overengineer problems that have more analog solutions. After all, it’s not clear how valuable these high-tech tools will be if people don’t actually use them.

Source: https://ift.tt/3vwRUn0

R OWN RESEARCH

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 01:33:03 +0800

Source: https://ift.tt/3apwiPu

So, There

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 19:33:49 +0800

Source: https://ift.tt/3Fus8UV

I've got your back .

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 01:33:24 +0800

Source: https://ift.tt/3lhNe0y

Tar balls, oiled birds, and months of cleanup on California’s beaches

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 01:33:24 +0800

As the oil spill spread across Orange County, an aerial view of Laguna Beach Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021. | Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Coastal communities are still reeling from a recent oil spill off Southern California that coated shorelines and marine life in black tar. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency after a pipeline ruptured late last week, unleashing an oil slick spanning 8,320 acres on waters near some of California’s most iconic beaches. Officials are still investigating the cause of the spill but think that a cargo ship’s anchor might have snagged and tore through the pipeline, the Los Angeles Times reports.

It could take months to assess and clean up some of the mess, and longer for ecosystems to recover. To learn more about what to expect, The Verge spoke with Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist and marine ecologist at the University of South Florida who studies the impact humans have on ocean ecosystems. Murawski was also the lead editor of the book Scenarios and Responses to Future Deep Oil Spills and previously served as chief scientist of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

I was hoping you could give me some context or a sense of scale when it comes to spills. How significant of a spill is the one off the coast of Southern California?

To put this in a little perspective, Deepwater Horizon, which was the largest accidental spill in global history, was about 2 million barrels. The Exxon Valdez spill was about 260,000 barrels. This one is about 3,400 barrels (about 144,000 gallons). Just in terms of volume, it’s a small percentage of what we would consider a catastrophic oil spill. That’s one perspective on it.

But it’s all about location. This is an oil spill of modest size; it’s in a very sensitive area. It’s only about four miles offshore. So just because it’s small, doesn’t mean it’s not significant. It’s very close to what we call amenity beaches, like Huntington Beach all the way down to Dana Point. Those are fully utilized for all kinds of recreation. That area in Southern California, you have a sort of persistent westward and southwestern wind. And so it only takes a few hours for that oil to be up on the beach. In the case of Deepwater Horizon, it was 50 miles offshore. It took weeks for the oil to actually come onto shore and so people could prepare for it. Here, there was no real preparation that you could do. It was up on the beach before people even knew you had a spill.

The other thing that you have to realize is, no two spills are exactly the same. It’s partially the geographic setup of the place, the wind, the tides, and all that. And it’s also the composition of the oil itself. Deepwater was what we would call Louisiana light sweet crude. I mean it was almost like cooking oil, it’s very light. This one, and all of the Southern California oils, are extremely heavy, dark, dense, oils. Heavy crude oils are higher in heavy components like asphaltenes, so they tend to be more toxic than the lighter ones.

So what risks might that oil pose to wildlife and people?

Oil is a conglomeration of about 40,000 different compounds. But the most problematic ones are the so called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAH. These PAH can be both toxic, that is they poison things, and they are also carcinogenic.

Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Oil lines the beach as a bird runs to avoid the incoming tide while a major oil spill washes ashore on the border of Huntington Beach and Newport Beach at the Santa Ana River Jetties Sunday, October 3rd, 2021 in Huntington Beach, California.

There’s two major sets of ecological issues, not only with PAH’s, but other components as well. One is worker health and safety. I noticed most of the workers are wearing PPE; that’s great. In terms of toxicity in wildlife, the most critical early issues are for the air breathers. So this would be the marine mammals and birds.

You always see pictures of oiled birds in oil spills. It’s problematic for them because it’s hard for them to regulate their body temperatures when they get oil on their feathers and skin. You often see birds preening. What they’re doing is they’re fluffing out their feathers because that’s their protection. So when they get oiled they start preening. As they’re preening with their beaks they’re ingesting the oil. You see a lot of media showing birds being cleaned with detergents and what not. The prognosis for those birds is generally not very good. It’s partly because they’ve ingested oil as well as getting it on their skin.

With the air breathers, there’s different ways that oil gets into their bodies and one of them is basically aspirating the oil, which gets into the lungs and the circulatory system. Like dolphins that may be in that water, they don’t do a good job avoiding oil. You know, it’s not something they encounter all the time. That area down there has a number of large whale species. Luckily, some of the major migrations have already happened and return migrations haven’t started, but that’s certainly something to worry about.

In California, authorities are collecting oil on the surface of the water using mechanical equipment called skimmers. And they’ve set up barriers called booms to try to stop the oil from spreading. What else can be done to clean up the spill, especially after it reaches shore?

Of all the habitats where oil can get into, beaches are probably one of the least complex in order to actually mitigate the effects of the spill and pick up the oil. It’s not a very convoluted habitat and you can use machinery to groom those beaches, to get rid of tar balls and all that.

Particularly with this heavy crude oil, the oil comes in on waves and it gets mixed with beach sand. And so you get these patties that form, and they will persist at what we call the toe of the beach — that’s sort of where the waves break. And so I wouldn’t be surprised that as winter storms come, you’ll see tar balls cast on that beach all winter long.

The more problematic issue with the California spill is that there are several points of headlands there that enter into estuaries and marshes. Once oil enters the estuary and marsh habit, it cannot be cleaned up. I mean you can skim some oil at the surface, but once it gets entangled in all the wetlands vegetation, there’s no real way to mitigate that without causing more damage than the oil would itself.

Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Workers with Patriot Environmental Services clean up oil that flowed into the Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach on Sunday, October 3rd, 2021.

One of the strategies for these habitats is to try to string booms across the mouths of these estuaries to intercept the oil that might be coming in. That can be effective if the weather and wave action cooperate. But if it’s bad weather, oil just hops over these booms which are not particularly high.

Once it’s in a habitat like this, there’s a lot of sediment that gets transported there until eventually the oil will be sequestered by the sediment. It’s sort of landfilled. Once it’s landfilled deep enough, oxygen will not get to it, and it’s the oxygen exposure and the sunlight that actually weathers oil. So once it’s below the oxygen line, it’ll degrade extremely slowly. It will probably be there for decades.

Source: https://ift.tt/3iJ9QFC

Ten years after we lost Steve Jobs

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 15:33:48 +0800

Losing Steve affected me more than it probably should have, given that I never met him or had any correspondence with him.

But losing him was devastating — not just to my world, but the world.

He was a sort of virtual father figure: I was always hoping that maybe Steve would notice something I did.

We all wanted his attention and approval, and that drove us to do better work — even those of us who never worked at Apple.

Nobody replaced him in this role. Nobody can.

But as an outsider who had no personal relationship with him to mourn, it has been most depressing to consider how much of his work the world missed out on.

He wasn’t taken from us after a long, complete life — he was taken in his prime.

He had so much more to offer the world.

Source: https://ift.tt/3uHqSJf

Efficient Partitioning of Road Networks

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:33:14 +0800

Posted by Ali Kemal Sinop, Senior Research Scientist, Google Research and Mahmuda Ahmed, Senior Software Engineer, Google Maps

Design techniques based on classical algorithms have proved useful for recent innovation on several large-scale problems, such as travel itineraries and routing challenges. For example, Dijkstra’s algorithm is often used to compute routes in graphs, but the size of the computation can increase quickly beyond the scale of a small town. The process of “partitioning” a road network, however, can greatly speed up algorithms by effectively shrinking how much of the graph is searched during computation.

In this post, we cover how we engineered a graph partitioning algorithm for road networks using ideas from classic algorithms, parts of which were presented in “Sketch-based Algorithms for Approximate Shortest Paths in Road Networks” at WWW 2021. Using random walks, a classical concept that is counterintuitively useful for computing shortest routes by decreasing the network size significantly, our algorithm can find a high quality partitioning of the whole road network of the North America continent nearly an order of magnitude faster¹ than other partitioning algorithms with similar output qualities.

Using Graphs to Model Road Networks
There is a well-known and useful correspondence between road networks and graphs, where intersections become nodes and roads become edges.

Image from Wikipedia

To understand how routing might benefit from partitioning, consider the most well-known solution for finding the fastest route: the Dijkstra algorithm, which works in a breadth-first search manner. The Dijkstra algorithm performs an exhaustive search starting from the source until it finds the destination. Because of this, as the distance between the source and the destination increases, the computation can become an order of magnitude slower. For example, it is faster to compute a route inside Seattle, WA than from Seattle, WA to San Francisco, CA. Moreover, even for intra-metro routes, the exhaustive volume of space explored by the Dijkstra algorithm during computation results in an impractical latency on the order of seconds. However, identifying regions that have more connections inside themselves, but fewer connections to the outside (such as Staten Island, NY) makes it possible to split the computation into multiple, smaller chunks.

Top: A routing problem around Staten Island, NY. Bottom: Corresponding partitioning as a graph. Blue nodes indicate the only entrances to/exits from Staten Island.

Consider driving from point A to point B in the above image. Once one decides where to enter Staten Island (Outerbridge or Goethals) and where to exit (Verrazzano), the problem can be broken into the three smaller pieces of driving: To the entrance, the exit, and then the destination using the best route available. That means a routing algorithm only needs to consider these special points (beacons) to navigate between points A and B and can thus find the shortest accurate path faster.

Note that beacons are only useful as long as there are not too many of them—the fewer beacons there are, the fewer shortcuts need to be added, the smaller the search space, and the faster the computation—so a good partitioning should have relatively fewer beacons for the number of components (i.e., a particular area of a road network).

As the example of Staten Island illustrates, real-life road networks have many beacons (special points such as bridges, tunnels, or mountain passes) that result in some areas being very well-connected (e.g., with large grids of streets) and others being poorly connected (e.g., an island only accessible via a couple of bridges). The question becomes how to efficiently define the components and identify the smallest number of beacons that connect the road network.

Our Partitioning Algorithm
Because each connection between two components is a potential beacon, the approach we take to ensure there are not too many beacons is to divide the road network in a way that minimizes the number of connections between components.

To do this, we start by dividing the network into two balanced (i.e., of similar size) components while also minimizing the number of roads that connect those two components, which results in an effectively small ratio of beacons to roads in each component. Then, the algorithm keeps dividing the network into two at a time until all the components reach the desired size, in terms of the number of roads inside, that yields a useful multi-component partition. There is a careful balance here: If the size is too small, we will get too many beacons; whereas if it is too large, then it will be useful only for long routes. Therefore the size is left as an input parameter and found through experimentation when the algorithm is being finalized.

While there are numerous partitioning schemes, such as METIS (for general networks), PUNCH and inertial-flow (both optimized for road-network likes), our solution is based on the inertial-flow algorithm, augmented to run as efficiently on whole continents as it does on cities.

Balanced Partitioning for Road Networks
How does one divide a road network represented as a graph into two balanced components, as mentioned above?A first step is to make a graph smaller by grouping closely connected nodes together, which allows us to speed up the following two-way partitioning phase. This is where a random walk is useful.

Random walks enjoy many useful theoretical properties—which is why they have been used to study a range of topics from the motion of mosquitoes in a forest to heat diffusion—and that most relevant for our application is that they tend to get “trapped” in regions that are well connected inside but poorly connected outside. Consider a random walk on the streets of Staten Island for a fixed number of steps: because relatively few roads exit the island, most of the steps happen inside the island, and the probability of stepping outside the island is low.

Illustration of a random walk. Suppose the blue graph is a hypothetical road network corresponding to Staten Island. 50 random walks are performed, all starting at the middle point. Each random walk continues for 10 steps or until it steps out of the island. The numbers at each node depict how many times they were visited by a random walk. By the end, any node inside the island is visited much more frequently than the nodes outside.

After finding these small components, which will be highly connected nodes grouped together (such as Staten Island in the above example), the algorithm contracts each group into a new, single node.

Reducing the size of the original graph (left) by finding groups of nodes (middle) and coalescing each group into a single “super” node (right). Example here chosen manually to better illustrate the rest of the algorithm.

The final steps of the algorithm are to partition this much smaller graph into two parts and then refine the partitioning on this small graph to one on the original graph of the road network. We then use the inertial flow algorithm to find the cut on the smaller graph that minimizes the ratio of beacons (i.e., edges being cut) to nodes.

The algorithm evaluates different directions. For each direction, we find the division that minimizes the number of edges cut (e.g., beacons) between the first and last 10% of the nodes

Having found a cut on the small graph, the algorithm performs a refinement step to project the cut back to the original graph of the road network.

Conclusion
This work shows how classical algorithms offer many useful tools for solving problems at large scale. Graph partitioning can be used to break down a large scale graph problem into smaller subproblems to be solved independently and in parallel—which is particularly relevant in Google maps, where this partitioning algorithm is used to efficiently compute routes.

Acknowledgements
We thank our collaborators Lisa Fawcett, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Kostas Kollias, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, Ameya Velingker from Google Research and Pablo Beltran, Geoff Hulten, Steve Jackson, Du Nguyen from Google Maps.

¹This technique can also be used for any network structure, such as that for brain neurons. ^↩

Source: https://ift.tt/3mkrxMW

Jassy and Nadella Go to Washington

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 21:33:28 +0800

The tech industry’s top CEOs made a pilgrimage to the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the growing problem of ransomware and other cyber threats. Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that meeting to see the side-eye between Andy Jassy, Amazon’s new CEO, and Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s leader.

Source: https://ift.tt/2XXM2Xb

Mine Captcha

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:33:31 +0800

Source: https://xkcd.com/2496/

How to change your iPhone’s text size for a specific app

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 19:41:07 +0800

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg

Sometimes you want the text in your app to be smaller, so you can fit more content on a single screen. Sometimes you want it to be bigger, especially if you’ve been putting off buying those reading glasses. But until recently, if you had an iPhone, you had to pick a single text size as a standard for all your apps.

Not anymore. In iOS 15, you can adjust the text size separately for each of your apps. So you can, for example, keep the text small for your email, but make it a bit larger in Twitter — or vice versa. (Thanks to @OmarShahine for the info.)

One of the best hidden new iOS 15 features is per app font sizes. I like to use the smallest dynamic size system wide but bump up Outlook by one side since I read so much email. pic.twitter.com/aL8TxOIXVA
— Omar Shahine (@OmarShahine) July 16, 2021

If you’ve got the public beta of iOS 15 installed, here’s how you can adjust the text size for each app.

First, you need to make sure the “Text Size” option is in your iOS Control Center:

Swipe from the upper-right corner to get to your Control Center. Check to see if “Text Size” is there.
If it isn’t, then quit Control Center and go to “Settings” > “Control Center.”
Under the “More Controls” subhead, find “Text Size” and tap the plus sign on the left to add it to your included controls. This will add it to your Control Center.

Go to “Settings” > “Control Center,” then find “Text Size” and tap the green plus sign.

“Text Size” will now be part of the included controls.

Once that’s done, it’s simple to tweak the text size for each app:

Open the app that you want to configure.
Swipe from the upper-right corner to get to Control Center.

If you need to switch text size, swipe from the upper-right corner.

Tap the double-A “Text Size” icon.

Tap the “Text Size” icon (the one with the small and large A’s).
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a toggle on the left for that specific app (for example, the left side of the toggle will say “Twitter Only,” and the right side will say “All Apps.”) Move the toggle to the left.
Once that’s done, use the main control in the center of the screen to set the text size for that app, and then tap anywhere on the screen to get back to the Control Center.

The toggle at the bottom lets you switch text size for a single app.

Now you’ve changed the text size just for that app.

Swipe up to get rid of the Control Center and you’ll return to your app. You should see the difference in the text size immediately — but that difference will not be reflected in other apps.

And, of course, if you want to switch back to a standard text size, just go back to the Control Center, select “Text Size,” and move the bottom toggle to “All Apps.” But be aware that you’ll be resetting all your apps to that text size.

Source: https://ift.tt/3z9q6p4

Twitter may be working on Twitter Blue, a subscription service that would cost $2.99 per month

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:07:17 +0800

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has previously confirmed that it’s exploring a paid subscription model for some features, and app researcher Jane Manchun Wong tweeted Saturday that she’s discovered how much it will cost and what it will be called. Twitter Blue, Wong says, will cost $2.99 per month, and will include an Undo Tweets feature and bookmark collections. Wong says it appears Twitter is working on a tiered subscription model, which she posits could mean a less-cluttered, premium experience for the highest-paying subscribers.

Twitter is calling their upcoming Subscription Service “Twitter Blue”, priced at $2.99/month for now, including paid features like:

Undo Tweets: https://t.co/CrqnzIPcOH

Collections: https://t.co/qfFfAXHp1o pic.twitter.com/yyMStpCkpr
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 15, 2021

Twitter didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on Saturday, but the company doesn’t usually confirm or otherwise comment on Wong’s typically accurate discoveries of new features before they launch.

Twitter has made a slew of new product announcements over the past several weeks, updating its warnings for potentially offensive tweets, improving its photo cropping algorithm to allow “taller” images to fully display in users’ feeds, adding the ability for Android users to search their direct messages, and rolling out a Tip Jar feature to allow users to make donations to some creators, journalists, experts, and non-profits (although that last one raised some privacy concerns about what user information is included along with the tip).

And earlier this month, Twitter acquired Scroll, the $5-per-month subscription services that removes ads from websites that participate. With the Scroll announcement, Twitter also said it would be winding down Nuzzel, a Scroll service that sent users daily email roundups of top stories in their Twitter feeds.

In its first-quarter earnings report late last month, Twitter had a profit of $68 million on revenue of $1.04 billion. The company reported a 20 percent increase in monetizable daily active users.

There’s no word yet on when a premium paid version of Twitter would launch, or who would be eligible.

Source: https://ift.tt/33LxFop

Oh Facebook

Wed, 05 May 2021 22:27:52 +0800

Signal blog:

We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses.

I love the idea behind these ads. Total transparency, sharing with you an up-to-the-moment picture of what Facebook is sharing with its advertisers.

And I love the execution of the ads. Follow the headline link, look at the examples. Easy to follow, devastatingly personal.

What I absolutely hate is that Facebook killed the ads. To me, this perfectly reflects Facebook’s fight with Apple. But Facebook can’t simply delete Apple’s transparency effort.

Props to Signal for these ads. Props to Apple for their transparency push.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Source: https://ift.tt/3b1rLUg

Particles on a plane

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:47:47 +0800

The CDC says it’s safe to travel now if you’re vaccinated, so you may or may not want to see this, but The New York Times shows how air particles circulate through an airplane.

Tags: airplane, breathing, coronavirus, New York Times

Source: https://ift.tt/3eiPb8v