Are you a man confused on how to treat the women you work with? Do you feel like if you can’t say or do *anything* you don’t know what to…
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👓 Words still matter : Medium’s mission — five years in | Ev Williams
Ev WilliamsWhere we’re going Though we’ve been working on this set of problems since the beginning, this year Medium took a big step toward a new solution. Our subscription strategy is based on a simple idea: By charging readers directly, we can make the experience and the content better, which creates a no-brainer proposition for anyone who values their time. By eschewing ads, we remove conflicts between serving our readers and serving those paying the bills. And while many publishers are looking towards subscriptions as an alternative to the deleterious effects of ads (a move we support for everyone), Medium is the only “open paywall” for thoughtful content on the internet. Which means, we tap into the ideas and expertise of thousands of the smartest minds on the planet — many of whom made Medium what it is today — to bring fresh perspectives to Medium members. And starting today, anyone can enroll in our Partner Program and earn money based on the depth and value they provide to members, not the fleeting attention they deliver to advertisers. Along with that, we add stories from the world’s best publishers and seamlessly combine it all in an ad-free, personalized experience. The end goal is to offer the world’s best source for important stories and ideas.
👓 Half the universe’s missing matter has just been finally found | New Scientist
About half the normal matter in our universe had never been observed – until now. Two teams have finally seen it by combining millions of faint images into one
👓 Matt Damon, Russell Crowe Reportedly Helped Kill a 2004 Harvey Weinstein Article | Vulture
The Wrap editor Sharon Waxman trades accusations with top Times editors, says Weinstein pressured celebrity friends to help kill the story.
📗 Started reading Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil
📖 Read introduction of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
Based on the opening, I’m expecting some great examples many which are going to be as heavily biased as things like redlining seen in lending practices in the last century. They’ll come about as the result of missing data, missing assumptions, and even incorrect assumptions.
I’m aware that one of the biggest problems in so-called Big Data is that one needs to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up the data (often by hand) to get something even remotely usable. Even with this done I’ve heard about people not testing out their data and then relying on the results only to later find ridiculous error rates (sometimes over 100%!)
Of course there is some space here for the intelligent mathematician, scientist, or quant to create alternate models to take advantage of overlays in such areas, and particularly markets. By overlay here, I mean the gambling definition of the word in which the odds of a particular wager are higher than they should be, thus tending to favor an individual player (who typically has more knowledge or information about the game) rather than the house, which usually relies on a statistically biased game or by taking a rake off of the top of a parimutuel financial structure, or the bulk of other players who aren’t aware of the inequity. The mathematical models based on big data (aka Weapons of Math Destruction or WMDs) described here, particularly in financial markets, are going to often create such large inequities that users of alternate means can take tremendous advantage of the differences for their own benefits. Perhaps it’s the evolutionary competition that will more actively drive these differences to zero? If this is the case, it’s likely that it’s going to be a long time before they equilibrate based on current usage, especially when these algorithms are so opaque.
I suspect that some of this book will highlight uses of statistical errors and logical fallacies like cherry picking data, but which are hidden behind much more opaque mathematical algorithms thereby making them even harder to detect than simple policy decisions which use the simpler form. It’s this type of opacity that has caused major market shifts like the 2008 economic crash, which is still heavily unregulated to protect the masses.
I suspect that folks within Bryan Alexander’s book club will find that the example of Sarah Wysocki to be very compelling and damning evidence of how these big data algorithms work (or don’t work, as the case may be.) In this particular example, there are so many signals which are not only difficult to measure, if at all, that the thing they’re attempting to measure is so swamped with noise as to be unusable. Equally interesting, but not presented here, would be the alternate case of someone tremendously incompetent (perhaps who is cheating as indicated in the example) who actually scored tremendously high on the scale who was kept in their job.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Introduction
Do you see the paradox? An algorithm processes a slew of statistics and comes up with a probability that a certain person might be a bad hire, a risky borrower, a terrorist, or a miserable teacher. That probability is distilled into a score, which can turn someone’s life upside down. And yet when the person fights back, “suggestive” countervailing evidence simply won’t cut it. The case must be ironclad. The human victims of WMDs, we’ll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx
Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
[WMDs are] opaque, unquestioned, and unaccountable, and they operate at a scale to sort, target or “optimize” millions of people. By confusing their findings with on-the-ground reality, most of them create pernicious WMD feedback loops.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx
Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
The software is doing it’s job. The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for truth. We’ll see this dangerous confusion crop up again and again.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx
Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
I’m reading this as part of Bryan Alexander’s online book club.
👓 Empathy for the Devil | Devon Marisa Zuegel | Medium
History is too often reduced to stories of good versus evil. We get the impression that we are somehow different from the people who were bad, and we take for granted that we would never make similar
👓 Vladimir Voevodsky, 1966 – 2017 | John Carlos Baez
This mathematician died last week. He won the Fields Medal in 2002 for proving the Milnor conjecture in a branch of algebra known as algebraic K-theory. He continued to work on this subject until he helped prove the more general Bloch-Kato conjecture in 2010. Proving these results — which are too technical to easily describe to nonmathematicians! — required him to develop a dream of Grothendieck: the theory of motives. Very roughly, this is a way of taking the space of solutions of a collection of polynomial equations and chopping it apart into building blocks. But the process of 'chopping up', and also these building blocks, called 'motives', are very abstract — nothing simple or obvious.
There’s some interesting personality and history in this short post of John’s.
👓 The Next Platform | Pierre Levy
One percent of the human population was connected to the Internet at the end of the 20th century. In 2017, more than 50% is. Most of the users interact in social media, search information, buy products and services online. But despite the ongoing success of digital communication, there is a growing dissatisfaction about the big tech companies (the “Silicon Valley”) who dominate the new communication environment. The big techs are the most valued companies in the world and the massive amount of data that they possess is considered the most precious good of our time. The Silicon Valley owns the big computers: the network of physical centers where our personal and business data are stored and processed. Their income comes from their economic exploitation of our data for marketing purpose and from their sales of hardware, software or services. But they also derive considerable power from the knowledge of markets and public opinions that stems from their information control.
Transparency is the very basis of trust and the precondition of authentic dialogue. Data and people (including the administrators of a platform), should be traceable and audit-able. Transparency should be reciprocal, without distinction between rulers and ruled. Such transparency will ultimately be the basis of reflexive collective intelligence, allowing teams and communities of any size to observe and compare their cognitive activity.
The trouble with some of this is the post-truth political climate in which basic “facts” are under debate. What will the battle between these two groups look like and how can actual facts win out in the end? Will the future Eloi and Morlocks be the descendants of them? I would have presumed that generally logical, intelligent, and educated people would generally come to a broadly general philosophical meeting of the minds as to how to best maximize life, but this seems to obviously not be the case as the result of the poorly educated who will seemingly believe almost anything. And this problem is generally separate from the terrifically selfish people who have differing philosophical stances on how to proceed. How will these differences evolve over time?
This article is sure to be interesting philosophy among some in the IndieWeb movement, but there are some complexities in the system which are sure to muddy the waters. I suspect that many in the Big History school of thought may enjoy the underpinnings of this as well.
I’m going to follow Pierre Levy’s blog to come back and read a bit more about his interesting research programme. There’s certainly a lot to unpack here.
Annotations
Commonality means that people will not have to pay to get access to the new public sphere: all will be free and public property. Commonality means also transversality: de-silo and cross-pollination.
Openness is on the rise because it maximizes the improvement of goods and services, foster trust and support collaborative engagement.
We need a new kind of public sphere: a platform in the cloud where data and metadata would be our common good, dedicated to the recording and collaborative exploitation of our memory in the service of collective intelligence. According to the current zeitgeist, the core values orienting the construction of this new public sphere should be: openness, transparency and commonality
The practice of writing in ancient palace-temples gave birth to government as a separate entity. Alphabet and paper allowed the emergence of merchant city-states and the expansion of literate empires. The printing press, industrial economy, motorized transportation and electronic media sustained nation-states.
The digital revolution will foster new forms of government. We discuss political problems in a global public space taking advantage of the web and social media. The majority of humans live in interconnected cities and metropoles. Each urban node wants to be an accelerator of collective intelligence, a smart city.
👓 A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money and was fed up with academia | QZ
Jeffrey Hall, a retired professor at Brandeis University, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries elucidating how our internal body clock works. He was honored along with Michael Young and his close collaborator Michael Roshbash. Hall said in an interview from his home in rural Maine that he collaborated with Roshbash because they shared...
This is an all-too-often heard story. The difference is that now a Nobel Prize winner is telling it about himself!
👓 Tillerson was summoned to the White House amid presidential fury | NBC News
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was called to the White House after a furious President Trump reacted to reports of a growing rift between the two men.
👓 NRA support for restricting ‘bump stocks’ reflects impact of Las Vegas massacre | Washington Post
Less clear is whether the move signals an opening for further action on gun control.
👓 Las Vegas Is Only the Deadliest Shooting in US History Because They Don’t Count Black Lives | The Root
News reporters and anchors have repeatedly referred to the recent tragedy in Las Vegas as the “worst mass shooting in U.S. history.” Like all things that are constantly repeated, the proclamation has become fact.
There’s some great history here. It reminds me about the podcast Seeing White which I’ve been listening to recently.
👓 A Tech of Our Own | Beyond the Wrapper – Martha Burtis
Last night, we (meaning the DKC and my colleagues in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies) hosted a premiere of a short horror film that we shot in May of 2016. We developed the script over about three weeks, shot the movie in one day, and then took over a year to get our acts together and finish editing it. In fact, the only reason it WAS finished was because of two amazing new students who split their time between tutoring in the DKC and supporting DTLT, Stef and Bethany. They started only two months ago, but they began working on the movie almost immediatley and, in collaboration with Jess Reingold, masterminded a pretty amazing event last night. We had a nice turnout in the Digital Auditorium and it was incredibly satisfying to be in a room of people enjoying The Convergence.
👓 Unverified | Hack Education
I’ve tried half a dozen times now to get my Twitter account verified. Each time, I’ve been rejected. “We reviewed the account, and unfortunately it is not eligible to be verified at this time.”
I’m surprised that Twitter wouldn’t verify Audrey, particularly given her body of written work and the journalistic nature of some of it. Most of the verified people I know are writers and/or journalists. I’m half tempted to create several impersonating accounts so she can claim to need verification for that reason.
👓 Decades of Sexual Harassment Accusations Against Harvey Weinstein | New York Times
An investigation by The New York Times found allegations stretching back to 1990 about Mr. Weinstein’s treatment of women in Hollywood.
Sadly I recognize some of the worst of the entertainment industry in this article. Too many impetuous people who wouldn’t otherwise get anything don’t have anyone around them to actually say no.