Link:
Search through Biden & Trump speeches for their first-hand thoughts on topics that are important to you.
Make an informed decision this election season. Spread the word:
Civics: Judge & Jury: Stifling Dissent on Youtube (Google), etc.
The Byju’s-WhiteHat Jr duo have weaponised opaque yet stringent copyright infringement rules on social media to their own benefit
One of Pradeep Poonia’s YouTube videos criticising WhiteHat Jr was taken down; Aniruddha Malpani was booted out of LinkedIn
Poonia, Malpani claim Byju’s is targeting their critical posts through third-party anti-piracy firms, taking down posts they deem unviable
Platform rules have made entities judge and jury, despite claims of neutrality; legal complaints, a shift to other channels seem to be only recourse
Two individuals from two different walks of life have challenged the prowess of edtech giants Byju’s and WhiteHat Jr. But a system of strategic social media takedowns—of posts and people—threatens their right to dissent and criticise
When you weaponize, & automate, copyright notices so brands can take down any content they don’t like, not just copyright-infringing content, & platforms enable that at scale! If only someone hired such firms for taking trolls & abusers off social media!https://t.co/41OOvDNN7L pic.twitter.com/gQZ7OrZgBI
— Subrahmanyam KVJ (@SuB8u) October 6, 2020
Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google Services, including Madison.
86% of U.S. teens own an iPhone, 89% want one
Both the 86% iPhone ownership and 89% intention to purchase an iPhone metrics are record highs for our Teen Survey, up from 85% and 88%, respectively, in Spring-20. We believe the increased penetration and intention are incredibly important for a maturing premium smartphone market. In addition, these trends are encouraging ahead of Apple’s 5G iPhone launch, which could provide a significant product cycle refresh.
Also, the Apple Watch continues to be the top smartwatch among teens. The Apple Watch ownership was 25%, flat from the Spring-20 survey. We view the market share consistency as a great example of the company’s ability to drive hardware sales in the wearables/accessories market. Finally, we think these positive hardware trends can be a catalyst for further services growth, as the hardware installed based for Apple continues to grow.
Author Ivan Margolius on a chilling personal connection to classic Tatra cars
Radio Prague International, via Roman Meliška:
Tatra’s futuristic-looking, aerodynamic cars, which first appeared on the roads in the 1930s, represent some of the most distinctive designs ever produced in Czechoslovakia. These now classic cars were not the only thing Tatra made; as well as their well-known trucks, the company based in Kop?ivnice, Moravia also turned out planes, military vehicles and even the stunning Slovak Arrow train.
However, cars are the main focus of the book Tatra: The Legacy of Hans Ledwinka by Ivan Margolius and John G. Henry, which has just come out in Czech for the first time. Margolius’s father Rudolf Margolius was executed in the notorious Slánsky show trial when Ivan was a small boy and in the 1960s he moved to London, where he became an architect.
He shared a startling family connection to Tatra, and lots of fascinating information on the company’s history, in this interview from his home in the UK.
The title of the book is Tatra: The Legacy of Hans Ledwinka. Who was Hans Ledwinka?
FAQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission
A ten-strong team of scientists and doctors has written this guide trying to point out that the idea that droplets (big infected drops, ie from a cough or sneeze) or fomites (infected drops on a surface) are the principal modes of transmission of Covid-19 just doesn’t add up:
Takeaway Tuesday – On Old Age
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer who tried to uphold republican principles in the final civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic. His writings include books on rhetoric, orations, philosophical and political treatises, and letters. He is remembered in modern times as the greatest Roman orator.
1. Old age is not unique in being burdensome…
I think, my friends, that you marvel at a thing really far from difficult. For to those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome; and, on the other hand, to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly!
They say that it stole upon them faster than they had expected. In the first place, who has forced them to form a mistaken judgement? For how much more rapidly does old age steal upon youth than youth upon childhood? And again, how much less burdensome would old age be to them if they were in their eight hundredth rather than in their eightieth year? In fact, no lapse of time, however long, once it had slipped away, could solace or soothe a foolish old age.
How we bend the knee to our HR overlords
The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?
What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?
If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital.
The soft coup of networked power
The soft coup of networked power:
Network power > State power
Terms of Service > Bill of Rights
Social AIs replace secret police
Social deplatforming replaces arrest and imprisonment (for dissidents)
— John Robb (@johnrobb) September 29, 2020
And
A small example of networked social cascade:
1) We get a parking ticket from a community college we never visited that lists our license plate but incorrectly describes our car make/model. Apparently, the private security guard transcribed it wrong. We ignore it.
1/n
— John Robb (@johnrobb) September 29, 2020
Worth reading: “Weapons of Math Destruction“.
Writing a book: is it worth it?
My Book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it! ?
To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don’t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.
Is it financially worth it?
Is it financially worth it?
Most books make very little money for both authors and publishers, but then occasionally something like Harry Potter comes along. If you are considering writing a book, I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero. Like starting a band with friends and hoping to become rock stars, it’s difficult to predict in advance what will be a hit and what will flop. Maybe this applies less to technical books than to fiction and music, but I suspect that even with technical books, there are a small number of hits, and most books sell quite modest numbers.
That said, in my case, I am happy to report that writing this book has in retrospect turned out to be a financially sound decision. These graphs show the royalties I have been paid since the book first went on sale:
The Forecasting Fallacy
Marketers are prone to a prediction.
You’ll find them in the annual tirade of trend decks. In the PowerPoint projections of self-proclaimed prophets. In the feeds of forecasters and futurists. They crop up on every conference stage. They make their mark on every marketing magazine. And they work their way into every white paper.
To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies looking for predictions with time frames ranging from 2025 to 2050. Whilst one prediction may be published multiple times, the size of the numbers still shocked me. Deloitte’s site makes 6904 predictions. McKinsey & Company make 4296. And Boston Consulting Group, 3679.
In total, these three companies’ websites include just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over the next 30 years.
But it doesn’t stop there.
My analysis finished in the year 2050 not because the predictions came to an end but because my enthusiasm did.
Search the sites and you’ll find forecasts stretching all the way to the year 2100. We’re still finding our feet in this century but some, it seems, already understand the next.
I believe the vast majority of these to be not forecasts but fantasies. Snake oil dressed up as science. Fiction masquerading as fact.