"law" entries

Four short links: 12 October 2015

Four short links: 12 October 2015

Unattended Robots, Replicable Economics, Deep Learning Learnings, and TPP Problems

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 12, 2015
  1. Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale — software to let a robot examine a pile of objects, unattended overnight.
  2. Economics Apparently Not Replicable (PDF) — We successfully replicate the key qualitative result of 22 of 67 papers (33%) without contacting the authors. Excluding the six papers that use confidential data and the two papers that use software we do not possess, we replicate 29 of 59 papers (49%) with assistance from the authors. Because we are able to replicate less than half of the papers in our sample even with help from the authors, we assert that economics research is usually not replicable.
  3. 26 Things I Learned in the Deep Learning Summer School — 20. When Frederick Jelinek and his team at IBM submitted one of the first papers on statistical machine translation to COLING in 1988, they got the following anonymous review: The validity of a statistical (information theoretic) approach to MT has indeed been recognized, as the authors mention, by Weaver as early as 1949. And was universally recognized as mistaken by 1950 (cf. Hutchins, MT – Past, Present, Future, Ellis Horwood, 1986, p. 30ff and references therein). The crude force of computers is not science. The paper is simply beyond the scope of COLING.
  4. The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared (EFF) — If you dig deeper, you’ll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.
Four short links: 19 August 2015

Four short links: 19 August 2015

Privacy-Respecting Algorithms, Dealers Growing, Book Recommendations, and End of Internet Dreams

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 19, 2015
  1. Efficient Algorithms for Public-Private Social Networks — Google Research paper on privacy-respecting algorithms for social networks. From the overview: the models of privacy we’re landing on (nodes or edges in the graph are marked as “private” by a user) mean that enforcing these privacy guarantees translates to solving a different algorithmic problem for each user in the network, and for this reason, developing algorithms that process these social graphs and respect these privacy guarantees can become computationally expensive. The paper shows how to efficiently approximate some of the graph operations required to run a social network.
  2. Rise of Networked Platforms for Physical World Services (Tim O’Reilly) — the central player begins by feeding its network of suppliers, but eventually begins to compete with it. […] Over time, as networks reach monopoly or near-monopoly status, they must wrestle with the issue of how to create more value than they capture — how much value to take out of the ecosystem, versus how much they must leave for other players in order for the marketplace to continue to thrive.
  3. Book Recommendations from BLDBLOG — Winslow memorably pointed out how farmers in the Sinaloa region of Mexico had been swept up into the cartel’s infinitely flexible method of production, and that, despite any ensuing role growing and harvesting marijuana or even poppies, the cartel offered them new jobs in logistics, not agriculture. “They didn’t want to be farmers,” Winslow said at Bookcourt, “they wanted to be FedEx.”
  4. The End of the Internet Dream (Jennifer Granick) — this is all gold. Something resonating with my current meditations: People are sick and tired of crappy software. And they aren’t going to take it any more. The proliferation of networked devices — the Internet of Things — is going to mean all kinds of manufacturers traditionally subject to products liability are also software purveyors. If an autonomous car crashes, or a networked toaster catches on fire, you can bet there is going to be product liability. […] I think software liability is inevitable. I think it’s necessary. I think it will make coding more expensive, and more conservative. I think we’ll do a crappy job of it for a really long time.
Four short links: 27 July 2015

Four short links: 27 July 2015

Google’s Borg, Georgia v. Malamud, SLAM-aware system, and SmartGPA

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 27, 2015
  1. Large-scale Cluster Management at Google with Borg — Google’s Borg system is a cluster manager that runs hundreds of thousands of jobs, from many thousands of different applications, across a number of clusters, each with up to tens of thousands of machines. […] We present a summary of the Borg system architecture and features, important design decisions, a quantitative analysis of some of its policy decisions, and a qualitative examination of lessons learned from a decade of operational experience with it.
  2. Georgia Sues Carl Malamud (TechDirt) — for copyright infringement… for publishing an official annotated copy of the state's laws. […] the state points directly to the annotated version as the official laws of the state.
  3. Monocular SLAM Supported Object Recognition (PDF) — a monocular SLAM-aware object recognition system that is able to achieve considerably stronger recognition performance, as compared to classical object recognition systems that function on a frame-by-frame basis. (via Improving Object Recognition for Robots)
  4. SmartGPA: How Smartphones Can Assess and Predict Academic Performance of College Students (PDF) — We show that there are a number of important behavioral factors automatically inferred from smartphones that significantly correlate with term and cumulative GPA, including time series analysis of activity, conversational interaction, mobility, class attendance, studying, and partying.
Four short links: 24 July 2015

Four short links: 24 July 2015

Artificial Compound Eye, Google Patent Licensing, Monitoring and Alerting, Computer-Aided Inference

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 24, 2015
  1. A New Artificial Compound Eye (Robohub) — three hexagonal photodetectors arranged in a triangular shape, underneath a single lens. These photodetectors work together and combine perceived changes in structured light (optic flow) to present a 3D image that shows what is moving in the scene, and in which direction the movement is happening.
  2. Google’s Defensive Patent Initiative (TechCrunch) — good article, despite TechCrunch origin. Two-tiered program: give away groups of patents to startups with $500k-$20M in revenue, and sell patents to startups.
  3. Bosun — an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange.
  4. The Rise of Computer-Aided Explanation (Michael Nielsen) — Hod Lipson of Columbia University. Lipson and his collaborators have developed algorithms that, when given a raw data set describing observations of a mechanical system, will actually work backward to infer the “laws of nature” underlying those data. (Paper)
Four short links: 22 July 2015

Four short links: 22 July 2015

Smart Headlights, Habitual Speed, AI Authors, and Programming Language Evolution

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 22, 2015
  1. Ford’s Smart Headlights — spotlights targeted by infra-red, and accumulating knowledge of fixed features to illuminate. Wonder what an attacker can do to it?
  2. Speed as a Habit — You don’t have to be militant about it, just consistently respond that today is better than tomorrow, that right now is better than six hours from now. This is chock full of good advice, and the occasional good story.
  3. Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author (PDF) — if AI creates cultural works (e.g., DeepDream images), who owns those works? Suggests that “work for hire” doctrine may be the way to answer that in the future. (via Andreas Schou)
  4. Punctuated Equilibrium in the Large-Scale Evolution of Programming Languages (PDF) — Here we study the large-scale historical development of programming languages, which have deeply marked social and technological advances in the last half century. We analyse their historical connections using network theory and reconstructed phylogenetic networks. Using both data analysis and network modeling, it is shown that their evolution is highly uneven, marked by innovation events where new languages are created out of improved combinations of different structural components belonging to previous languages. These radiation events occur in a bursty pattern and are tied to novel technological and social niches. The method can be extrapolated to other systems and consistently captures the major classes of languages and the widespread horizontal design exchanges, revealing a punctuated evolutionary path. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
Four short links: 8 July 2015

Four short links: 8 July 2015

Encrypted Databases, Product Management, Patenting Machine Learning, and Programming Ethics

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 8, 2015
  1. Zero Knowledge and Homomorphic Encryption (ZDNet) — coverage of a few startups working on providing databases that don’t need to decrypt the data they store and retrieve.
  2. How Not to Suck at Making Products — Never confuse “category you’re in” with the “value you deliver.” Customers only care about the latter.
  3. Google Patenting Machine Learning Developments (Reddit) — I am afraid that Google has just started an arms race, which could do significant damage to academic research in machine learning. Now it’s likely that other companies using machine learning will rush to patent every research idea that was developed in part by their employees. We have all been in a prisoner’s dilemma situation, and Google just defected. Now researchers will guard their ideas much more combatively, given that it’s now fair game to patent these ideas, and big money is at stake.
  4. Machine Ethics (Nature) — machine learning ethics versus rule-driven ethics. Logic is the ideal choice for encoding machine ethics, argues Luís Moniz Pereira, a computer scientist at the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics in Lisbon. “Logic is how we reason and come up with our ethical choices,” he says. I disagree with his premises.
Four short links: 6 April 2015

Four short links: 6 April 2015

Disruption, Copyright Investment, Max Headroom, and Right to Tinker

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 6, 2015
  1. The Difference Between Direct Competition and Disruption — As the ships grow, their engines have become vastly more efficient and sophisticated, the fuel mix has changed, and complex IT infrastructure has been put in place to coordinate the movement of the containers and ships. But fundamentally, the underlying cost structure of the business has not changed from 1950, when the first container ships carried a mere 500 to 800 containers across the world. (via Salim Virani)
  2. The Impact of Copyright Policy Changes on Venture Capital Investment in Cloud Computing Companies (PDF) — Our findings suggest that decisions around the scope of copyrights can have significant impacts on investment and innovation. We find that VC investment in cloud computing firms increased significantly in the U.S. relative to the EU after the Cablevision decision. Our results suggest that the Cablevision decision led to additional incremental investment in U.S. cloud computing firms that ranged from $728 million to approximately $1.3 billion over the two-and-a-half years after the decision. When paired with the findings of the enhanced effects of VC investment relative to corporate investment, this may be the equivalent of $2 to $5 billion in traditional R&D investment.
  3. Max Headroom Oral History — “Anybody under the age of 25 just loved it. And anybody above that age was just completely confused.”
  4. Auto Makers Say You Don’t Own Your Car (EFF) — Most of the automakers operating in the U.S. filed opposition comments through trade associations, along with a couple of other vehicle manufacturers. They warn that owners with the freedom to inspect and modify code will be capable of violating a wide range of laws and harming themselves and others. They say you shouldn’t be allowed to repair your own car because you might not do it right. They say you shouldn’t be allowed to modify the code in your car because you might defraud a used car purchaser by changing the mileage. They say no one should be allowed to even look at the code without the manufacturer’s permission because letting the public learn how cars work could help malicious hackers, “third-party software developers” (the horror!), and competitors.
Four short links: 24 March 2015

Four short links: 24 March 2015

Tricorder Prototype, Web Performance, 3D Licensing, and Network Simulation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 24, 2015
  1. Tricorder Prototype — collar+earpiece, base station, diagnostic stick (lab tests for diabetes, pneumonia, tb, etc), and scanning wand (examine lesions, otoscope for ears, even spirometer). (via Slashdot)
  2. Souders Joins Speedcurve — During these engagements, I’ve seen that many of these companies don’t have the necessary tools to help them identify how performance is impacting (hurting) the user experience on their websites. There is even less information about ways to improve performance. The standard performance metric is page load time, but there’s often no correlation between page load time and the user’s experience. We need to shift from network-based metrics to user experience metrics that focus on rendering and when content becomes available. That’s exactly what Mark is doing at SpeedCurve, and why I’m excited to join him.
  3. 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3D-Printed Stuff (PDF) — this paper is not actually about choosing the right license for your 3D printable stuff (sorry about that). Instead, this paper aims to flesh out a copyright analysis for both physical objects and for the digital files that represent them, allowing you to really understand what parts of your 3D object you are—and are not—licensing. Understanding what you are licensing is key to choosing the right license. Simply put, this is because you cannot license what you do not legally control in the first place. There is no point in considering licenses that ultimately do not have the power to address whatever behavior you’re aiming to control. However, once you understand what it is you want to license, choosing the license itself is fairly straightforward. (via BoingBoing)
  4. Augmented Traffic Control — Facebook’s tool for simulating degraded network conditions.
Four short links: 6 March 2015

Four short links: 6 March 2015

Design Fiction, 3D License, Web Funding, and API Magic

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 6, 2015
  1. Matt Jones: Practical Design Fiction (Vimeo) — the log scale of experience! Fantastic hour-long recap of the BERG thinking that he’s continued at the Google Creative Lab in NYC. (via Matt Jones)
  2. 3dPL — public license for 3d objects. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Google Contributor — when the web’s biggest advertiser tries alternative ways to fund web content, I’m interested.
  4. Templar — an HTTP proxy that provides advanced features to help you make better use of and tame HTTP APIs. Timeouts, caching, metrics, request collapsing, …
Four short links: 5 February 2015

Four short links: 5 February 2015

Mobile Supply Chain, Regulating the Interwebs, Meh MOOCs, and Security School

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | February 5, 2015
  1. The Home and the Mobile Supply Chain (Benedict Evans) — the small hardware start-up, and the cool new gizmos from drones to wearables, are possible because of the low price of components built at the scale required for Apple and other mobile device makers. (via Matt Webb)
  2. FCC Chairman Wheeler Proposes New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet (PDF) — America may yet have freedom. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritisation.
  3. The Future of College (Bill Gates) — The MOOC, by itself, doesn’t really change things, except for the very most motivated student. HALLELUJAH!
  4. Breaker 101 — 12-week online security course. $1,750 (cue eyes water). Putting the hacker back in hacker schools …