Tag: Sunday Paper

Sunday Paper - The iPad is not the best at everything, The Rural Creative Class, 10000 Steps

My kind of tablet by Riccardo MoriRiccardo Mori

My habits and preferences betray my somewhat long history with computers and technology. I didn’t grow up with smartphones and tablets. My first home computer was a Commodore VIC-20. I was 27 when I first used a mobile phone. Despite what some people may think, I’m not averse to change and my brain is still flexible enough to pick up new habits or change old ones. What happens when you get older, though, is you tend to consider more often whether changing a habit or rethinking a workflow is actually worth it. And what I’ve always said about the iPad in this regard is this: if I’m faster, more efficient, more productive with a Mac (or, in certain fringe cases, with an iPhone), why should I learn a more convoluted path to be able to do the same thing — but more slowly and less efficiently — on an iPad?

Riccardo hits the nail on the head. I've been an iPad user since the first iteration in 2010. While I love using my current iPad Pro, the hyperbole that the iPad is the only computer most people need bothers me. I perform too many computing tasks which, although possible on the iPad, are inefficient. While I can do much of my image editing in Adobe Lightroom Mobile, it takes me much longer to do so.

Large cities (or valleys) aren't the only places where innovation happens. I think Silicon Valley gets more attention and investment dollars than it deserves.

A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.

The survey divides businesses into three main groups. Roughly 30 percent of firms are substantive innovators, launching new products and services, making data-driven decisions, and creating intellectual property worth protecting; another 33 percent are nominal innovators who engage in more incremental improvement of their products and processes; and 38 percent show little or no evidence of innovation, so are considered to be non-innovators.

The first table below charts this breakdown for rural and urban areas. Establishments in urban areas are more innovative, but not by much. Roughly 20 percent of rural firms are substantive innovators, compared to 30 percent of firms in urban areas.The Rise of the Rural Creative Class by Richard Florida witing for CityLab

New research indicates that the advice to walk 10,000 steps per day was more marketing than fact.

Scientific or not, this bit of branding ingenuity transmogrified into a pearl of wisdom that traveled around the globe over the next half century, and eventually found its way onto the wrists and into the pockets of millions of Americans. In her research, Lee put it to the test by observing the step totals and mortality rates of more than 16,000 elderly American women. The study’s results paint a more nuanced picture of the value of physical activity.

“The basic finding was that at 4,400 steps per day, these women had significantly lower mortality rates compared to the least active women,” Lee explains. If they did more, their mortality rates continued to drop, until they reached about 7,500 steps, at which point the rates leveled out. Ultimately, increasing daily physical activity by as little as 2,000 steps—less than a mile of walking—was associated with positive health outcomes for the elderly women.What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You by Amanda Mull

The landscape of the social web. It’s an old post.

A last and different way to look at Social Networks could be the metaphor of landscapes, with mountains as barriers, and roads and rivers as attractors.

Closely knit groups would be villages, echo-chambers isolated villages with no nearby roads. Larger groups, sub-optimally meshed are towns and cities, where the risk of too little meshing lurks (homeless people, drop outs etc as a consequence). Lurkers might be unnoticed city dwellers, or tourists from other landscapes, that only become visible if they make themselves known as tourists, leave footprints or marks on/in the landscape as it were. (Kilroy was here). Lurking and Social Networks

Sunday Paper - Philosophy and Science, Understanding AI, Cultural Appropriation Police, Indie Social Media, Undergraduate College Admission

Sunday Paper is my collage of long-form articles, between 1,000 and 20,000 words, that I have saved during the weekend, that I found interesting and which I think require deep, slow thinking. I think they are a great way to read on a Sunday morning as a sort of personal Sunday newspaper.

Once upon a time, it was not just that philosophy was a part of science; rather, science was a branch of philosophy. We need to remember that modern science began as natural philosophy – a development of philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. Today, we think of Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley and, of course, Isaac Newton as trailblazing scientists, while we think of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz as philosophers. That division is, however, something we impose on the past. It is profoundly anachronistic.Natural philosophy redux by Nicholas Maxwell in Aeon

We are understanding that we don't' understand AI.

It seems that if we leave it up to the nine big companies that dominate the field of AI alone, we raise the spectre of a corporate controlled world of surveillance and conformity –– especially so long as gender, ethnic and global diversity is also lacking among their ranks of employees at all levels of a company. Having engineers, ethicists and human rights experts address collaboratively how AI should work increases the chance for better outcomes for humanity.
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Each and every one of us who cares about the health of the internet –– we need to scale up our understanding of AI. It is being woven into nearly every kind of digital product and is being applied to more and more decisions that affect people around the world. For our common understanding to evolve, we need to share what we learn. In classrooms, Stefania Druga is making a small dent by working with groups of children. In Finland, a grand initiative sought to train 1% of the country’s population (55,000 people) in the elements of AI. What will you do?Let's ask more of AI

How a prom dress triggered the cultural appropriation police.

The question is inspired by a spasm of social-media cruelty that caught wide attention recently. A young woman in Utah bought a Chinese-style dress to wear to her high school formal. She posted some photographs of herself on her personal Instagram page—and suddenly found herself the target of virulent online abuse.

For once, the story has a happy ending. Good sense and kindness prevailed, and instead of her prom being ruined, the young woman exited the dance buoyed by worldwide support and affirmation, most of all from within China.

Yet the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another. Sadly often, these stories end as successful power plays enforced by local bullies.
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The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people. It originated in the Manchurian conquest of China in 1648, an event comparable to Europe's Thirty Years War in its society-shattering murderousness. Millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, lost their lives in the upheaval.

The new rulers of Beijing required Chinese men to adopt Manchurian styles of dress and hair, including the notorious pigtail. When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.

The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern. In the past, upper-class women’s clothing had conveyed status and restricted movement. The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did. Every Culture Appropriates by David Frum in The Atlantic

I have been blogging continuously since about 2003 but when I discovered the IndieWeb about two years ago. I started using a set of WordPress plugins that have only enhanced my experience. I feel less of a need for Facebook and Twitter than I ever have.

Could the IndieWeb movement—or a streamlined, user-friendly version of it to come—succeed in redeeming the promise of social media? If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services. And, in a sense, decentralization also helps solve the problem of content moderation. One reason Mark Zuckerberg has called for the establishment of a third-party moderation organization is, presumably, that he’s realized how difficult it is to come up with a single set of guidelines capable of satisfying over a billion users; the IndieWeb would allow many different standards to emerge, trusting users to gravitate toward the ones that work for them. Decentralization still provides corners in which dark ideas can fester, but knowing that there’s a neo-Nazi Mastodon instance out there somewhere may be preferable to encountering neo-Nazis in your Twitter mentions. The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed.Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? by By Cal Newport in the New Yorker

American undergraduate college admission is rotten to the core.

The corrupt undergraduate admissions process at most schools today can flourish because the higher branches of the American academic tree are so good. But the lower branches are rotten with grade inflation and social promotion. The move away from an emphasis on genuine academic achievement and meritocratic promotion has done a disservice to the least well-off while offering more opportunities for the rich and connected to buy the trappings of success for their offspring. Make School Hard Again

Sunday Paper - The Tyranny of Metrics, Medicare, Generation X is a Mess, Facial Recognition Software Ban, LED lights and eye health, The Best Salad in the World

Sunday Paper is my personal collage of long-form articles, between 1,000 and 20,000 words, that I have saved during the weekend, that I found interesting and which I think require deep slow thinking. I think they are best read on a Sunday morning as a sort of personal Sunday newspaper.

We are drowning under a tsunami of data.

We live in an intensely and increasingly measured world. Virtually everything we do yields data, numbers, and information that we think will improve our performance, help us hit target goals, or figure out if we’re doing things right. Even just a few decades ago, this would have struck most of us as nuts, but now we take it for granted—at home, at work, at play.

In The Tyranny of Metrics, just out in paperback from Princeton University Press, historian Jerry Z. Muller explains how we got to a place where we’re constantly measuring everything we do—and why much of the time we’re not just wasting our time but making things objectively worse. How To Crush 'the Tyranny of Metrics' by Nik Gillespie

We all want free healthcare unless we have to pay for it.

In theory, Medicare for All is more popular than ever. Polls show that a majority of the country favors the idea, which, as proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), would set up a single-payer health care system that would make the government the financier of nearly all health care in the United States. Some surveys have even found that a surprisingly large percentage of Republicans are open to the idea.

But those same surveys consistently reveal that support for Medicare for All falls apart as soon people hear that it would raise taxes, result in delays for care, and eliminate private insurance—all of which are likely outcomes of a transition to single-payer. The public, in other words, favors the non-specific, cost-free idea of Medicare for All, but not the practical reality and the many trade-offs that it would necessarily entail.Kamala Harris Is Dodging Hard Questions About Medicare for All by Peter Suderman

We, Generation X, were we ever real?

Like many things considered “cool,” Gen X is pretty exclusive. You had to be born between 1965 and 1980 to get in to this gloomy, goofy club of forgotten middle children, and only about 65 million of us were. (Both boomers, at 75 million, and millennials, at 83 million, far outnumber us.)

The idea behind that “X” was about coming between. Gen X supposedly didn’t know what they were, or what they wanted. All they knew, they were told, was what they didn’t want — marriage, money, success — and then they shrugged and popped a Prozac.

As “Reality Bites” celebrates its 25th anniversary; as groups like Bikini Kill, Wu-Tang Clan and Hootie & the Blowfish reunite for tours; as generational idols like Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair publish memoirs; and as the first real Gen X candidates make a run for president, Gen X is in the air.

And you know what else Gen X is? Getting older. Its oldest members are 54; its youngest are preparing for 40. As we try to make sense of that fact, here’s a look at the stuff we loved and hated, as well as a re-evaluation of things like “The Rules,” grunge, CK One and 1994; an appreciation of John Singleton; a quiz to figure out which generation you actually are; and a visit with Evan Dando, plus some dynamite for the myths that have always dogged Gen X. So plug in your headphones, click on that Walkman and let’s travel through this time machine together.This Gen X Mess by Anya Strzemien in the New York Times

Time to start wearing reflective facepaint.

I’m less optimistic, and so is Ms. Garvie. “Face recognition gives law enforcement a unique ability that they’ve never had before,” Ms. Garvie told me. “That’s the ability to conduct biometric surveillance — the ability to see not just what is happening on the ground but who is doing it. This has never been possible before. We’ve never been able to take mass fingerprint scans of a group of people in secret. We’ve never been able to do that with DNA. Now we can with face scans.”

That ability alters how we should think about privacy in public spaces. It has chilling implications for speech and assembly protected by the First Amendment; it means that the police can watch who participates in protests against the police and keep tabs on them afterward.

In fact, this is already happening. In 2015, when protests erupted in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, the Baltimore County Police Department used facial recognition software to find people in the crowd who had outstanding warrants — arresting them immediately, in the name of public safety.San Francisco Is Right: Facial Recognition Must Be Put On Hold

According to a French health study, LED lights are damaging to the human eye, specifically the retina.

New scientific evidence confirms the "phototoxic effects" of short-term exposures to high-intensity blue light, as well as an increased risk of age-related macular degeneration after chronic exposure to lower-intensity sources, according to the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety, known as ANSES. Age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss among people over 50, causes damage to the macula, a small spot near the center of the retina that's needed for sharp central vision. LED lights damage eyes and disturb sleep, European health authority warns

Is is possible to fall in love with a salad?

... every time I’m in New York, I visit Via Carota, the charming West Village restaurant run by the partners Jody Williams and Rita Sodi — sometimes twice in a single day — just to order the insalata verde. For three years I’ve been eating this salad, and bite by bite, trying to decipher what makes it so unbelievably, mouth-smackingly perfect. The menu description gives little away: “leafy greens in sherry vinaigrette.” A visual inspection of the dish reveals only leaves of endive, butter lettuce, frisée and watercress all piled as high as gravity will allow, topped by a drizzle of dressing studded generously with shallots and mustard seeds. About a year into my obsession, an equally bedeviled friend suggested that there might be sugar in the vinaigrette. Thinking of the Mexican cook I’d met who sneaks a little Knorr seasoning into every salsa and salad dressing, I wondered: Maybe there was a tiny, secret pinch of MSG too? What else, besides such concessions to the dark arts, could make a green salad so appealing? The Best Green Salad in the World