January 2012
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What "Big Data" can Learn from Dubai's Skyscrapers...
Suddenly, we love data. It’s the hero in our TV shows, saves our baseball teams, generates our art, and is the topic of the moment at Davos. Our obsession borders on religion: we believe data is infallible, containing a single, emergent truth (the Guardian’s Datablog’s subtitle is “Facts are Sacred”). If our businesses or institutions are failing we say they need more...
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“So where do you get the songs for your digital music library? You probably own...”
– Apple, explaining iTunes in January of 2001.
Remember: the iPod wouldn’t arrive for 10 months and the store would take more than 2 years.
“Last year, about 70 percent of its estimated $237 million operating profit went...”
– Bloomberg on troubles at the New York Times.
There is no good answer to this problem that doesn’t involve a time machine. Better answers, yes, but not good ones.
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Symantec's Source Code was Stolen 6 Years Ago →
From Wired’s Threat Level:
The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.
Symantec said in its announcement that users should disable pcAnywhere until the company had time to update...
“In this issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time...”
– The Economist is beginning dedicated weekly coverage of China. This article is a succinct overview of why China matters. I heartily suggest you take 5 minutes and read the whole piece.
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“With regard to category interests, the demographic profiles easily pick up on...”
– Ars Technica editors share their Google ad preferences.
To be fair, “computers and electronics, video games, and cats” probably describes 75% of the internet.
To be unfair, Google pegs me as someone interested in “CD Audio Shopping”.
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History as a List →
NPR and Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich runs with my Frontiers through the Ages thought experiment, spinning it into a game we can play everywhere.
This makes my week.
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What will phishing attacks against AI look like? Will they be the same or play off the computer/human tension?
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The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss →
90wpm:
The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.
It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.
Here’s a small snip:
In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian mathematician...
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Education on a Digital Scale
Felix Salmon provides us with an update on Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, which wrapped in last year:
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an...
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“Remember back in October when after a rare “miss” by Apple (which was only a...”
– MG Siegler on Apple’s beyond blowout quarter beyond blowout quarter. 37 million iPhones, 15.43 million iPads, and 5.2 million Macs were sold.
The stock is hitting $460 in after-hours.
In the future we’ll only discuss daily deal sites as a brief symptom of the gradual realization that online populations are populations unto themselves.
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“None of the companies that produce liquid crystal display (LCD) panels—Samsung...”
– The Economist
The Economist identifies 3 reasons for the situation: televisions are commodified, manufacturers expanded capacity and created a glut, and all this coincided with a downturn in rich countries. Companies are trying to fight commodification with GoogleTV, custom Android builds, and...
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“In the U.S. we were very, very successful coming from the core enterprise...”
– Newly minted RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, whom doesn’t think RIM needs to make “seismic” changes.
I hope he realizes marketing isn’t the key to consumer growth. It’s the product and platform. If marketing could solve the problems created by loyal consumer myopia, Jerry...
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I propose a new rule for internet hygiene: there is no need to via, hat tip, or otherwise credit someone for simply pointing out an article from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, or any other widely read mass market publication, unless citing the actual author of the piece.
“When Newt Gingrich tore into CNN’s John King for kicking off Thursday night’s...”
– David Horsey (via azspot)
“The Muin is The Yird’s ae naitural satilyt (or muin), an the fift...”
– During the blackout, Megan discovered the fantastic Scots language wikipedia. Enjoy this selection from the Muin.
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Thoughts on Apple's Textbook Announcement
iBooks has always struggled to find a unique market to help Apple turn it into a unique product. After today’s announcement, I think Apple’s finally found such a market in education.
Education checks all the boxes: it’s a market that feeds Apple’s funnel (students have been very good to Apple in the past, especially between Jobs), is sufficiently valuable (worth...
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“In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as...”
– ABC News illuminates Romney’s tax tactics. Gawker’s right: this stereotypical rich guy behavior isn’t exactly surprising. But, it’s incredibly disingenuous.
Avoiding taxes on this scale raises an important question that Romney should answer: why does he want to be...
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“The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has looked at tomorrow’s...”
– Ars Technica.
“A dangerous and troubling development” and “abuse of power” is the amount of money established industries invest in creating protective laws instead of directly developing businesses and markets.
Also, SOPA’s not dead. Hearings are resuming in...
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New theory: Manhattan’s obsession with burgers has to do with their lack of backyards in which to grill.
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“Will Apple launch a sort of GarageBand for e-books? “That’s what we...”
– Ars Technica on Apple’s textbook event this week.
My hopes for this announcement, if it is a “GarageBand for eBooks”:
It’s free
It’s not just for text books
It is able to tie into a boilerplate Newsstand app, allowing publishers to more easily layout periodical...
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In India, a "Missed Call" is Ad-Hoc Infrastructure →
More on the growing toll-free missed call ecosystem in India:
This week Pluggd.in, an Indian site focused on Indian entrepreneurs and startups, profiled a startup called RealTech Systems which has developed an irrigation control system for farmers that uses cell phone networks and missed calls. Essentially a farmer installs the company’s Real Mobile Starter Control product at an irrigation...
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“Put simply, the old idea was that these smallish states were largely...”
– Josh Marshall (via ericmortensen)
I’ve been wondering why these states were chosen. This not only makes sense, but is a clear example of just how far our media environment has grown, subsuming local cycles and markets.
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“They didn’t write Angry Birds and become a billionaire. They wrote Angry...”
– Horace Dediu on the writer behind Shit My Dad Says and the lack of innovation in old media.
The creators disrupting old media aim to be hired by the the film studios, television networks, publishing houses, and newspapers they challenge. Creative tweeters angle for sitcoms, bloggers dream of...
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"Content" Creep
Publishers have stopped referring to their products as journalism, writing, literature, photography, or art. Today, everything is simply “content”.
Those working in media, especially digital media, can attest to the word’s popularity. Quantitatively we can observe this trend in the chart above: over the last ten years, annual financial reports from The New York Times have...
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SOPA's Main Targets are Immune from SOPA →
In short: SOPA doesn’t apply to .com and .org, because those registrars are within US jurisdiction and theoretically covered by existing measures. The authors of this heavy handed bill don’t understand the internet enough to make the law effective:
So, based on the law as written… The Pirate Bay is immune from SOPA (though, potentially not from ICE just seizing the domain)....
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“Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets, according to a...”
– NASA.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some government representation at Apple’s event next week.
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Has the Verge ever disliked something?
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“To bolster his argument, Shortz cited the Dictionary of American Slang (edited...”
– NPR, on a crossword controversy. Will Shortz’s last Saturday with the clue, “Wack, in hip-hop.” The answer was “illin.”
Note to everyone: if you quote a colloquial phrase from a culture which you do not belong to, don’t cite a tome from your own culture in your...
How many people are in space right now? →
jstn:
Currently six, “all on the International Space Station.” Twelve more astronauts are scheduled to go during 2012, and China will be sending its first taikonauts to the Tiangong experimental space station it launched last year.
During a show last month at the Bell House, Neil Tyson eloquently summed up1 the US’s space travel decline: “In 2012 there will still be two space...
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“Beauty Mode makes beautiful portraits by softening shadows and smoothing...”
– Olympus’s new VR-340 point and shoot comes with a “Beauty Mode”.
I can’t believe it’s taken until 2012 for this to appear.
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The Republican primary’s constant lead trading and buzzword driven development around an in name only common platform is remarkably similar to the current state of the Android OEMs.
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Spit Take of the Day: The NYT's 45 Places to Go in... →
The top five:
Panama
Helsinki, Finland
Myanmar
London
Oakland, CA
The only explanation for this is probably not a good sign for Oakland. They’ve reached the point where the NYT ceases to pity and has begun exoticizing. To the East Coast, Oakland is practically a banana republic now.
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“(One interesting side note: The cameras on drone aircraft in Afghanistan take...”
– NYTimes.com on the shipping container as a medium, which the military is hot-swapping in and out of Afghanistan.
(via new-aesthetic)
“Comedy Bang! Bang! is a sketch variety show featuring celebrity guests, comedy...”
– Excellent news. IFC announced today the greenlight of two ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’
NYC will no longer require Taxi TV →
Respite!
In a nod to years of griping from captive passengers, taxi officials agreed to let the owners of the new cabs decide whether to install the screens, which are required in the city’s 13,000 yellow taxis.
“With Taxi TV, there’s a diversity of opinion as to the value for passengers,” David S. Yassky, the taxi and limousine commissioner, said rather delicately. “So it makes more...
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The Oscars will not consider documentaries without... →
Hollywood pretends none of this internet stuff ever happened:
In a move to trim the number of documentaries submitted annually for Oscar consideration, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is poised to require a movie review from The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times to qualify a documentary feature for the Academy Awards.
…
Mr. Powers called it “a strange...