"numbers" entries

Four short links: 7 April 2016

Four short links: 7 April 2016

Fairness in Machine Learning, Ethical Decision-Making, State of Hardware, and Against Web DRM

  1. Fairness in Machine Learning — read this fabulous presentation. Most ML objective functions create models accurate for the majority class at the expense of the protected class. One way to encode “fairness” might be to require similar/equal error rates for protected classes as for the majority population.
  2. Safety Constraints and Ethical Principles in Collective Decision-Making Systems (PDF) — self-driving cars are an example of collective decision-making between intelligent agents and, possibly, humans. Damn it’s hard to find non-paywalled research in this area. This is horrifying for the list of things you can’t ensure in collective decision-making systems.
  3. State of Hardware Report (Nate Evans) — rundown of the stats related to hardware startups. (via Renee DiResta)
  4. A Recent Discussion about DRM (Joi Ito) — strong arguments against including Digital Rights Management in W3C’s web standards (I can’t believe we’re still debating this; it’s such a self-evidently terrible idea to bake disempowerment into web standards).
Four short links: 16 March 2016

Four short links: 16 March 2016

Analytic Monitoring, Commenter Demographics, Math and Empathy, and How We Read

  1. MacroBaseAnalytic monitoring for the Internet of Things. The code behind a research paper, written up in the morning paper where Adrian Colyer says, there is another story that also unfolds in the paper – one of careful system design based on analysis of properties of the problem space, of thinking deeply and taking the time to understand the prior art (aka “the literature”), and then building on those discoveries to advance and adapt them to the new situation. “That’s what research is all about!” you may say, but it’s also what we’d (I’d?) love to see more of in practitioner settings, too. The result of all this hard work is a system that comprises just 7,000 lines of code, and I’m sure, many, many hours of thinking!
  2. Survey of Commenters and Comment ReadersAmericans who leave news comments, who read news comments, and who do neither are demographically distinct. News commenters are more male, have lower levels of education, and have lower incomes compared to those who read news comments. (via Marginal Revolution)
  3. The Empathizing-Systemizing Theory, Social Abilities, and Mathematical Achievement in Children (Nature) — systematic thinking doesn’t predict math ability in children, but being empathetic predicts being worse at math. The effect is stronger with girls. The authors propose the mechanism is that empathetic children pick up a teacher’s own dislike of math, and any teacher biases like “girls aren’t good at math.”
  4. Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read (NYT) — On average, fewer than half of the books tested were finished by a majority of readers. Most readers typically give up on a book in the early chapters. Women tend to quit after 50 to 100 pages, men after 30 to 50. Only 5% of the books Jellybooks tested were completed by more than 75% of readers. Sixty percent of books fell into a range where 25% to 50% of test readers finished them. Business books have surprisingly low completion rates. Not surprisingly low to anyone who has ever read a business book. They’re always a 20-page idea stretched to 150 pages because that’s how wide a book’s spine has to be to visible on the airport bookshelf. Fat paper stock and 14-point text with wide margins and 1.5 line spacing help, too. Don’t forget to leave pages after each chapter for the reader’s notes. And summary checklists. And … sorry, I need to take a moment.
Four short links: 15 February 2016

Four short links: 15 February 2016

Deep Learning Analogies, IoT Privacy, Robot Numbers, and App Economy

  1. Deep Visual Analogy-Making (PDF) — In this paper, we develop a novel deep network trained end-to-end to perform visual analogy making, which is the task of transforming a query image according to an example pair of related images. Open source code from the paper also available.
  2. Samsung’s TV and Privacy Gets More AwkwardSamsung has now issued a new statement clarifying how the voice activation feature works. “If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search,” Samsung said in a statement. “At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.” It only seems creepy until you give in and nothing bad happens, then you normalise the creepy.
  3. 2015 Robot Numbers (RoboHub) — The Robotic Industries Association (RIA), representing North American robotics, reported […] 2015 set new records and showed a 14% increase in units and 11% in dollars over 2014. The automotive industry was the primary growth sector, with robot orders increasing 19% year over year. Non-automotive robot orders grew at 5%.
  4. Mozilla, Caribou Digital Release Report Exploring the Global App Economy (Mark Surman) — The emerging markets are the 1% — meaning, they earn 1% of total app economy revenue. 95% of the estimated value in the app economy is captured by just 10 countries, and 69% of the value is captured by just the top three countries. Excluding China, the 19 countries considered low- or lower-income accounted for only 1% of total worldwide value. Developers in low-income countries struggle to export to the global stage. About one-third of developers in the sample appeared only in their domestic market.

Four short links: 12 January 2016

Four short links: 12 January 2016

Civilian Drone Market, Things Learned, Playful Things, and Bottom-up CS

  1. Overview of the Civilian Drone Market (DIY Drones) — Six categories: toy quadcopters; FPV/racing; consumer camera drones; prosumer camera drones; consumers, industrial, agricultural, NGO and Research drones; winged and VTOL drones.
  2. 52 Things I Learned in 2015 — very high strike rate of “interesting!”
  3. How to Turn Complicated Things into Playful Things (Tom Whitwell) — Children are the apex players, at the top of the hierarchy. Only when they’re absent will adults play. […] You know when play is working, because the room gets noisy.
  4. Bottom Up Computer ScienceA free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals, and system library fundamentals.
Four short links: 25 December 2015

Four short links: 25 December 2015

Bad Data, Breakout Startups, Drone Economics, and Graph Signs

  1. Bad Data Guide (Quartz) — An exhaustive reference to problems seen in real-world data along with suggestions on how to resolve them.
  2. Breakout List — companies where all the action is happening. Read alongside Startup L Jackson’s “How to Get Rich in Tech, Guaranteed.”
  3. The Economics of Drone DeliveryThe analysis is still mostly speculative. Keeney imagines that 6,000 operators who earn $50,000 per year will operate 30,000 to 40,000 drones. Each drone will make 30 deliveries per day. Her analysis ignores depreciation and questions like: ‘How will drones avoid airplanes and deliver packages in Manhattan?’ And there’s another core issue: $12.92 is the price UPS charges to consumers, but its actual marginal cost of delivering one more package along a route they are delivering to already is probably closer to $2. When push comes to shove, will drones be able to compete? (via Chris Anderson)
  4. 7 Ways Your Data is Telling You It’s a GraphNetwork, tree, taxonomy, ancestry, structure – if people are using those words to talk about an organizational chart or reporting structure, they’re telling you that data and the relationships between that data are important.
Four short links: 9 December 2015

Four short links: 9 December 2015

Graph Book, Data APIs, Mobile Commerce Numbers, and Phone Labs

  1. Networks, Crowds, and Markets — network theory (graph analysis), small worlds, network effects, power laws, markets, voting, property rights, and more. A book that came out of a Cornell course by ACM-lauded Jon Kleinberg.
  2. Qua framework for building data APIs. From a government department, no less. (via Nelson Minar)
  3. Three Most Common M-Commerce Questions Answered (Facebook) — When we examined basket sizes on an m-site versus an app, we found people spend 43 cents in app to every $1 spent on m-site. (via Alex Dong)
  4. Phonelabs — science labs with mobile phones. All open sourced for maximum spread.
Four short links: 1 December 2015

Four short links: 1 December 2015

Radical Candour, Historical Social Network, Compliance Opportunities, and Mobile Numbers

  1. Radical Candour: The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss — this, every word, this. “Caring personally makes it much easier to do the next thing you have to do as a good boss, which is being willing to piss people off.”
  2. Six Degrees of Francis Baconrecreates the British early modern social network to trace the personal relationships among figures like Bacon, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and many others. (via CMU)
  3. Last Bus Startup Standing (TechCrunch) — Vahabzadeh stressed that a key point of Chariot’s survival has been that the company has been above-board with the law from day one. “They haven’t cowboy-ed it,” said San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener, a mass transit advocate who recently pushed for a master subway plan for the city. “They’ve been good about taking feedback and making sure they’re complying with the law. I’m a fan and think that private transportation options and rideshares have a significant role to play in making us a transit-first city.”
  4. Mobile App Developers are Sufferingthe top 20 app publishers, representing less than 0.005% of all apps, earn 60% of all app store revenue. The article posits causes of the particularly extreme power law.
Four short links: 3 November 2015

Four short links: 3 November 2015

Quantum Architectures, Gig Economy Size, Networking Truths, and Twitter's Decay

  1. Australians Invent Architecture for Full-Scale Quantum Computer (IEEE) — still research paper, so I’ll believe it when it can glitch Hangouts just like a real computer.
  2. How Big is the Gig Economy? (Medium) — this is one example in which the Labor Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics really have shirked their responsibility to try and assess the size and growth of this dynamic shift to our economy.
  3. The Twelve Networking Truths — RFC1925 is channeling the epigram-leaking protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love. It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving the problem to a different part of the overall network architecture) than it is to solve it. This is true for most areas of life: generally easier to make it someone else’s problem than to solve it.
  4. The Decay of Twitter (The Atlantic) — In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”
Four short links: 9 October 2015

Four short links: 9 October 2015

Page Loads, Data Engines, Small Groups, and Political Misperception

  1. Ludicrously Fast Page Loads: A Guide for Full-Stack Devs (Nate Berkopec) — steps slowly through the steps of page loading using Chrome Developer Tools’ timeline. Very easy to follow.
  2. Specialised and Hybrid Data Management and Processing Engines (Ben Lorica) — wrap-up of data engines uncovered at Strata + Hadoop World NYC 2015.
  3. Power of Small Groups (Matt Webb) — Matt’s joined a small Slack community of like-minded friends. There’s a space where articles written or edited by members automatically show up. I like that. I caught myself thinking: it’d be nice to have Last.FM here, too, and Dopplr. Nothing that requires much effort. Let’s also pull in Instagram. Automatic stuff so I can see what people are doing, and people can see what I’m doing. Just for this group. Back to those original intentions. Ambient awareness, togetherness. cf Clay Shirky’s situated software. Everything useful from 2004 will be rebuilt once the fetish for scale passes.
  4. Asymmetric Misperceptions (PDF) — research into the systematic mismatch between how politicians think their constituents feel on issues, and how the constituents actually feel. Our findings underscore doubts that policymakers perceive opinion accurately: politicians maintain systematic misperceptions about constituents’ views, typically erring by over 10 percentage points, and entire groups of politicians maintain even more severe collective misperceptions. A second, post-election survey finds the electoral process fails to ameliorate these misperceptions.
Four short links: 30 September 2015

Four short links: 30 September 2015

Homebrew Bioweapons, Drone Strikes, Git Security, and Integrity Boost

  1. Homebrew Bioweapons Not Imminent Threat — you need a safe facility, lab instruments, base strain, design and execution skills, and testing. None of these are easy until the Amazon-Google cloud wars finally cause them to move into “bioweapons as a service.”
  2. Apple Removes App That Tracks Drone Strikes“there are certain concepts that we decide not to move forward with, and this is one,” says Apple. (via BoingBoing)
  3. gitroba command line tool that can help organizations and security professionals find such sensitive information. The tool will iterate over all public organization and member repositories and match filenames against a range of patterns for files, that typically contain sensitive or dangerous information.
  4. How Much is a Leader’s Integrity Worth?Kiel found that high-integrity CEOs had a multi-year return of 9.4%, while low-integrity CEOs had a yield of just 1.9%. What’s more, employee engagement was 26% higher in organizations led by high-integrity CEOs. (via Neelan Choksi)