Category: ideas

While this podcast is largely about home automation, this particular episode featuring Basheer Tome from Google, is a fantastic, intelligent, clear, no-hype exploration of virtual reality, augmented reality and user experience and design topics. Definitely worth a listen, IMHO.

There is a lot of talk these days of the evil of ‘fake news’. As far as I can tell, fake news is just a symptom. The real problem is the ‘easy money’ mentality of the online ad machine. This largely anonymous (and most definitely unregulated) mechanism rewards any and all bad behavior by handing out cash for page views. These days, that means page views creaking from the overload of irrelevant advertising that delivers no value to the viewer but does enrich the bottom-dwellers that plaster ads all over the page. Fake news, clickbait, porn, gossip, real news – at this point they are rewarded equally by advertisers.

Fake news is only the most headline grabbing; there is so much more of this dubious activity festering everywhere and in more subtle ways. Most recently, I have noticed online retailers starting to use unnecessary parcel tracking services ‘to better server their customers’. In this case, to better serve customers bandwidth wasting, unnecessary advertising. I have strongly suggested to some retailers that I do business with to just stick the tracking number for my order in the shipment confirmation email. I don’t want to (or need to) click on a series of links that are awash with advertising just to get to the tracking number that could and should be provided me in plain text in my email.

I can’t tell if companies are just ill-informed or just don’t care that much about customer satisfaction and privacy when it comes to things like this. We recently stayed at a hotel in San Diego that offered as one of it’s ‘customer services’ the ability to text the hotel if something was needed. What was not disclosed was that this service is not operated by the hotel, but by a third party. So, by texting the ‘hotel’ you are (probably unwittingly) providing this third party with your cell phone number, name, info about your stay and who knows what else. That information gets sold immediately and you get nothing for it. Just like the dubious ‘free’ safe in your room that requires you to swipe a credit card to ‘activate it’. As soon as you swipe, some unknown, undisclosed third party now has your credit card number, name and whatever else is encoded on your credit card’s magstripe. That’s right, I don’t need or want your data harvesting in the middle.

Additionally, I have little sympathy for all of the web sites that block visitors if they are using ad blocking software (which has been shown to prevent the distribution of ad-based malware (aka, forbes, businessinsider, wsj, wired, etc). They whine about not getting their vig from online ads but are silent about the 10, 15, 20 trackers and beacons (in the form of cookies and local storage) that they DO profit from that are placed on your system without your knowledge or approval (again ‘to better provide you service’). But, don’t believe me, run a browser extension like Ghostery to see all the garbage that gets placed on your system when you visit one of these cookie cesspools. Alternatively, you can at least click on the site information icon in Chrome and see all the ‘3rd party’ cookies that are placed on your system.

Increasingly, the web is moving away from its roots as a means to easily share information (and actual data) into the realm of the quick buck, ‘publish anything that will generate a click’ crapfest we have now.

Install ad-blocking in your browser and think before (and after) you click.

Self proclaimed futurist tweets an obfuscated link to an ad-encrusted pull quote that links to an article… behind a paywall.

For some the internet has moved from a means to share information and ideas to one that exists solely to generate clicks that have zero information value (well, except to them – ‘ad impressions’ and all that). And, no, I don’t want to sign up for you email-harvesting ‘newsletter’ that you never publish but benefit by selling on my contact information.

I would love to see (and use) this in more locations. Sadly, it will likely be quickly perverted to route visitors to/near shops and other unattractive locales.

If you want to find the most scenic route to get somewhere, there may soon be an app for that. Daniele Quercia and colleagues at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona have come up with a way to create a crowd-sourced measure of a city’s beauty, and made an algorithm to find the prettiest way to get from one point to another. “The goal of this work is to automatically suggest routes that are not only short but also emotionally pleasant,” the scientists told Technology Review:

Quercia and co begin by creating a database of images of various parts of the center of London taken from Google Street View and Geograph, both of which have reasonably consistent standards of images. They then crowd-sourced opinions about the beauty of each location using a website called UrbanGems.org.
Each visitor to UrbanGems sees two photographs and chooses the one which shows the more beautiful location. That gives the team a crowd-sourced opinion about the beauty of each location. They then plot each of these locations and their beauty score on a map which they use to provide directions.

Amazingly small. But I imagine what it would take to distribute all of that power is the real trick.

I like this because it makes the concept much more concrete: leaving excavation equipment in the ground because they didn’t have a plan for extracting it (and now it is ‘too expensive’). Sound familiar tech folks?

I am not so sure how ‘useful’ these examples are. Is the fact that most of them have negative connotations a reflection of the person who curated them or of the Russian language?

This was one of my favorites:

переподвыподверт (‘per-e-pod-‘voy-pod-‘vert)
Reddit user deffun on /r/doesnottranslate defined this noun as “to do something in a complex, incomprehensible way.”

The word kind of embodies itself, as it has four prefixes including one that repeats itself twice.

About a month ago, I attended the API Strategy and Practice conference in San Francisco. Overall, a pretty good conference and, as always, much of the value was in connecting with people between and after sessions.

One panel discussion was concluded with the question ‘what is the future of the internet?’. The responses seemed to fall into two categories 1) code/APIs everywhere and/or 2) intelligent consumption and composition of the available APIs.

I wanted to point out that the first category of thought reflected the view of a (now defunct) little technology outfit just down the highway who voiced the credo of ‘the network is the computer’. They had a great spec/implementation for a technology called JINI that very much reflected the philosophy of ‘be a node and not a hub’ – inherently scalable and cluster-able running practically anywhere.

The second group reminded me of the great AI gold rush in the mid-90s, when ‘intelligent agents‘ were going to manage all our personal data and book travel and plan meetings based on all of the metadata that we surround ourselves with. Companies were funded and failed trying to deliver on this vision (General Magic anyone?). Perhaps it was an idea before it’s time and enough has changed and opened up that it might work this time. We shall see.

Not even sure where to start with this psycho-babble rant I just read.

To me, the whole thing reads like an insecure individual trying to justify their warped world view by blaming it on everyone else. Sure, I know that there are bad things that happen to women at tech conferences (and elsewhere) and that is stupid and inexcusable. But, to use that as justification for the view that *all* men are rapist/gropers/whatever is also stupid and inexcusable. The simple fact is that if you are looking to be offended, you will find offense in everything and everybody around you. Especially, if you play both sides of a situation: if someone engages with you, it is for strictly sexual purposes and if they don’t then they are *obviously* denigrating you because you are a female. There is no good way out of that spiral other than recognizing that the premise is setup for self fulfilling distrust.

Being guilty of whatever darkness is in another person’s head is just raw prejudice with a unhealthy dose of over-generalization/labeling. Sure, lets play the game (fill in the blanks): All ______ are lazy. All _____ are cheap. All _____ are bad drivers. And all men at tech events are misogynistic predators. Right.

I have some recent evidence on this front. I was at a tech conference in San Francisco last month and had some fantastic conversations with some of the female attendees there (and the male ones as well). Topics ranged from privacy, genetic testing, pregnancy(!), hypermedia, security concerns for services, agile practices, gardening, coding standards and whisky. No one was groped or molested or talked down to. Oddly enough, at the drinks reception on the last night, I did have a woman approach me several times and try to invite herself back to my room (which I gently but firmly declined). Do I think all women at tech events are horn-dogs because of that? No, not for one minute.

For an excellent exploration of learning to be offended, see this article at NPR. The referenced article is coming at this topic from race rather than gender, but I think it resonates with many of the points I made.

I am a little wary of the vague but hype-intensive discussions around the Internet of Things (IoT). I am particularly leery when I ask a pundit in the area ‘what *specifically* is IoT going to have the biggest impact on?’ The answer tends to meander along the path of ‘it will change everything’ and ‘there isn’t anything you can’t do with it’. Right. Sort of reminds me of the 90s-era hyperbolic proclamations about Object Oriented databases and how they were going to change everything. As one wag rightly summarized that hype: ‘Object oriented databases are a billion dollar market with no customers’.

SCADA, RFID, SNMP, RPC, etc – didn’t all of these come with the same set of snares and delusions that seems to surround the IoT piper? I fear the only thing that is different this time around is that IoT is paired with the equally rabid running mate ‘Big Data’ that is desperately trying to find a problem to solve and in so doing might encourage the accumulation of whatever data from IoT that it can take on.

I think I am in favor of pro-active laws against wearing/using something like Google Glass while driving. It is a form of distracted driving and aligns with the current laws regarding texting and driving.

Yes, it is that time of year, when people go shopping, because, well, they are supposed to shop. New York magazine has a great article that explores just how crazy this is Why Black Friday Is A Behavioral Economist’s Nightmare:

The big problem with Black Friday, from a behavioral economist’s perspective, is that every incentive a consumer could possibly have to participate — the promise of “doorbuster” deals on big-ticket items like TVs and computers, the opportunity to get all your holiday shopping done at once — is either largely illusory or outweighed by a disincentive on the other side. It’s a nationwide experiment in consumer irrationality, dressed up as a cheerful holiday add-on.

It then goes on to explore the retailing ‘tricks’ that are employed:

The doorbuster: The doorbuster is a big-ticket item (typically, a TV or other consumer electronics item) that retailers advertise at an extremely low cost. (At Best Buy this year, it’s this $179.99 Toshiba TV.) We call these things “loss-leaders,” but rarely are the items actually sold at a loss. More often, they’re sold at or slightly above cost in order to get you in the store, where you’ll buy more stuff that is priced at normal, high-margin levels.
That’s the retailer’s Black Friday secret: You never just buy the TV. You buy the gold-plated HDMI cables, the fancy wall-mount kit (with the installation fee), the expensive power strip, and the Xbox game that catches your eye across the aisle. And by the time you’re checking out, any gains you might have made on the TV itself have vanished.

Implied scarcity: This is when a store attempts to drum up interest in an item by claiming “limited quantity” or “maximum two per customer,” which makes us think we’re getting something valuable when we may not be. It’s a staple of deceptive marketing, and at no time in the calendar year is it in wider use than on Black Friday. (There is also actual scarcity on Black Friday — when stores carry only a 50 or 100 of an advertised doorbuster item — which also introduces a risk that you’ll be 51st or 101th in line and waste your time entirety. Both are bad.)

I spent Black Friday at home, with my family, working through my to-do list. Aside from lunch, we didn’t venture out to buy a thing.