Typosquatting: It’s not fraud until someone complains, then Google will take it down. New findings from Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman at Harvard University reported in New Scientist.
Fulfilling your duties, where does that land you? Into jealousy, upsets, persecution. Is that the way to get on? Butter people up, good God, butter them up, watch the great, study their tastes, fall in with their whims, pander to their vices, approve of their injustices. That’s the secret.
Google remains completely committed to freedom of expression and to privacy, and we have a strong track record of protecting both.
—Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, opens his response to privacy concerns on Google Buzz: NYT, with a nod to Baseline Scenario‘s wonderful take on meaningless corporate PR spin
People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network
—Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center: NYT. He plans to file a complaint with the FTC, arguing that Google’s attempt to convert an email program into a social network was unfair and deceptive. Danny Sullivan would say, “I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with. And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”
Hey, computer, how does that compare to the reaction of other presidents to other natural disasters….The problem is that while our computers can process the words of our news stories, they don’t understand the meaning of these words. our machines are only able to do the very specific tasks we assign them to. They are very clever, but they lack common sense….The task of thinking is still ours.
—Damon Horowitz, CTO of Aardvark: Tedx Talk – SoMa.
Horowitz discusses how computers can index and search a corpus of news articles, find those related to the earthquake in Haiti, and then extract facts and figures through semantic analysis, but he concludes that these capabilities will only go so far. If you want to understand how Obama’s reaction to the earthquake differs from that of other presidents to other natural disasters, you need to ask a person. He then closes with the familiar conceit, which Marvin Minsky observed in 1982: computers are clever, but they lack common sense.
Lamenting the decline in interest in philosophy, Horowitz steps back and suggests that technology’s focus on solving problems is an effort to “get rid of them,” rather than learn from them. As a philosopher, he suggests, when we encounter problems: “we’re grateful. They show us that there’s something wrong about our world-view. There’s something we need to learn…the insights we get from that are invaluable.”
It follows that technology, though useful, takes us away from our primary objective – human interaction. Human interaction facilitates thinking. Thinking begets learning, and learning helps us better understand the faults in our world-view, so we can engage family, community, business, sport, life. Therefore, one should orient technology toward facilitating human interaction and identify the specific problems that must be gotten rid of to do so. Horowitz concludes: “I now believe that the primary goal for technology should not be replacing human intelligence but rather facilitating human interaction.” Hence, Aardvark and engineered serendipity.
For decades, men have adapted poorly to the shifting demands of the service economy. Now they are paying the price. For decades, the working-class social fabric has been fraying. Now the working class is in danger of descending into underclass-style dysfunction. For decades, young people have been living in a loose, under-institutionalized world. Now they are moving back home in droves.
—David Brooks: NYT. Brooks reflects on the current malaise through the prism of Don Peck’s piece in The Atlantic, narrows the discussion to “America’s social weak spots,” and identifies three areas of strain: the shift to a service economy; the social fabric of the working class; and the position of “young people” in an “under-institutionalized world.” His response intimates a massive social engineering project: “redefine masculinity”; vast “anti-poverty programs”; and “institutions for unaffiliated 24-year-olds”. Brooks clearly advocates an optimistic approach to mending these three “weak spots,” but the real question will be whether one can engineer a solution or if society’s responsive mutations will form something itself. Just as the old saw about free-will demands one consider whether one chose to go to work today or if it was the world that chose for you, we will see just how intentional we can be about firming up these weak-spots. Afterall, Germany’s Weimar Republic arguably suffered from similar issues with masculinity, poverty, and institutions for young people.
There are lots of great credit stories, but the option of going with the Fed and the government — it takes away part of the risk…There needs to be liquidity. A reverse repo contract is not considered to be liquid in the context of anything beyond seven days.
—Deborah Cunningham, a chief investment officer at Federated Investors, $318 billion in money-market investments. Bernanke’s proposal would bring money-market mutual fund managers on as primary dealers, which would dramatically increase the current $100b capacity of its eighteen primary dealers. Bernanke suggested that the relationships would “further increase its capacity to drain reserves through reverse repos…[and is]…in the process of expanding the set of counterparties with which it can transact.” Separately, if there ever was a place with multiple chiefs, it would have to be Federated Investors.
This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.
–Chris Leinberger, Brookings Institute: via the Atlantic. The boom fueled substandard construction methods as homebuilders raced to introduce inventory, home-buyers raced to buy it up: there’s a lot of Chinese dry-wall out there. Though Leinberger’s analysis is appealing on the age-old question of the merits of the country or the city, it may not follow exactly in the way he presents. Leinberger’s analysis raises the question of how suburbs with older, similar vintage housing-stock will fare. He reserves his comparison to one between older urban and newer suburban homes, but he excludes categories such as the durable housing stock of older suburbs that were constructed with similar methods and materials as the urban homes he reveres. Where would these fit in his analysis? Do they follow his analysis and go the way of a general sclerosis of the suburbs, or are they singularly appealing and require him to reconsider his analysis?
The time you spend reading this tweet is gone, lost forever, carrying you closer to death. Am trying not to abuse the privilege
—Roland Hedley, via George Packer: New Yorker
Avatar slams Confucius, state sponsored entertainment: an allegory for our time
Stilltitled 