I'm currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It's about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That's when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.
Category: Read
👓 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | New York Times
The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.
👓 Big names in statistics want to shake up much-maligned P value | Nature
One of scientists’ favourite statistics — the P value — should face tougher standards, say leading researchers.
👓 EXCLUSIVE: First human embryos edited in U.S., using CRISPR | MIT Technology Review
Researchers have demonstrated they can efficiently improve the DNA of human embryos.
👓 First Support for a Physics Theory of Life | Quanta Magazine
Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.
The situation changed in the late 1990s, when the physicists Gavin Crooks and Chris Jarzynski derived “fluctuation theorems” that can be used to quantify how much more often certain physical processes happen than reverse processes. These theorems allow researchers to study how systems evolve — even far from equilibrium.
I want to take a look at these papers as well as several about which the article is directly about.
Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.”
Some truly harsh words from his former supervisor? Wow!
maybe there’s more that you can get for free
Most of what’s here in this article (and likely in the underlying papers) sounds to me to have been heavily influenced by the writings of W. Loewenstein and S. Kauffman. They’ve laid out some models/ideas that need more rigorous testing and work, and this seems like a reasonable start to the process. The “get for free” phrase itself is very S. Kauffman in my mind. I’m curious how many times it appears in his work?
👓 ‘Personalized Learning’ and the Power of the Gates Foundation to Shape Education Policy | Hack Education
There are two obvious sources of funding and PR for “personalized learning” – the Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The former has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “personalized learning” products and projects; the latter promises it will spend billions.
👓 A Domain of One’s Own in a Post-Ownership Society | Hack Education
The University of Mary Washington’s initiative, “Domain of One’s Own,” is phrased thusly as a nod to Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she famously quipped that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” We can critique – and certainly we should – the class implications and expectations in Woolf’s commandment here; and we must consider both the financial burden and the transaction mechanism of a push for domains in education – as Maha notes, for example, many students in Egypt don’t have a credit card with which to make online purchases. “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days,” Woolf wrote in 1929. (That 500 quid is the equivalent to about $37,000 when adjusted for inflation.) But Woolf is not simply talking about having a piece of paper – a title, for example – that decrees she owns the room. It’s about having the financial freedom and a personal space to write. To own is to possess. To own is to have authority and control. To own is to acknowledge. It implies a responsibility. Ownership is a legal designation; but it’s something more than that too. It’s something more and then, without legal protection, the word also means something less.
👓 John Heard, the Frazzled Father in ‘Home Alone,’ Dies at 71 | New York Times
Mr. Heard played pained characters in dramas but was best known as the dad who embarked on a family trip to Paris without his youngest son.
I recall thinking about him fondly a month ago as I watched The Pelican Brief, but may remember him best for his frustrating turn in Big as well as a bevvy of great guest roles on television.
👓 In tweet storm, Trump decries ‘illegal leaks’ and asserts ‘all agree’ he has complete power to pardon | Washington Post
The president said a Post report of Attorney General Jeff Sessions's discussions with the Russian ambassador was based on leaks that “must stop.”
👓 Kaisa Matomäki Dreams of Primes | Quanta Magazine
Kaisa Matomäki has proved that properties of prime numbers over long intervals hold over short intervals as well. The techniques she uses have transformed the study of these elusive numbers.
👓 In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium | Quanta Magazine
John Nash’s notion of equilibrium is ubiquitous in economic theory, but a new study shows that it is often impossible to reach efficiently.
To some extent I also find myself wondering about repeated play as a possible random walk versus larger “jumps” in potential game play and the effects this may have on the “evolution” of a solution by play instead of a simpler closed mathematical solution.
👓 Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business? | Hack Education
Within the past week, two well-known and well-established coding bootcamps have announced they’ll be closing their doors: Dev Bootcamp, owned by Kaplan Inc., and The Iron Yard, owned by the Apollo Education Group (parent company of the University of Phoenix). Two closures might not make a trend… yet. But some industry observers have suggested we might see more “consolidation” in the coming months.
👓 USC moves to fire, ban from campus former medical school dean over ‘egregious behavior’ | LA Times
Former U.S. Attorney will investigate drug allegations involving former USC medical school dean
👓 Petition to Re-License React has been Escalated to Facebook’s Engineering Directors | WP Tavern
React users are petitioning Facebook to re-license React.js after the Apache Software Foundation announced its decision to ban Apache PMC members from using any technology licensed with Facebook’s BSD+Patents License. So far the GitHub issue has received 627 “thumbs up” emoji and 66 comments from concerned React users who are hoping for a change in licensing. Many respondents on the thread said that ASF’s decision affects their organizations’ ability to continue using React in projects. “Apache CouchDB and others will switch away from React if we have to,” CouchDB committer Robert Newson said. “We’d rather not, it’s a lot of work for no real gain, but we don’t have a choice. Changing license can be simple (RocksDB completed that change in a day).”
👓 Why Is Anthony Scaramucci Following Me on Twitter? | The Atlantic
Yes, this is probably a Taye Diggs situation.