- What Paul Graham is Missing About Inequality (Tim O’Reilly) — When a startup doesn’t have an underlying business model that will eventually produce real revenues and profits, and the only way for its founders to get rich is to sell to another company or to investors, you have to ask yourself whether that startup is really just a financial instrument, not that dissimilar to the CDOs of the 2008 financial crisis — a way of extracting value from the economy without actually creating it.
- 2016 The Year of Conversational Commerce (Chris Messina) — I really hope that these conversations with companies are better than the state-of-the-art delights of “press 5 to replay” phone hell.
- Society of Mind (MIT) — Marvin Minsky’s course, with lectures.
-
Trust vs Transparency (PDF) — explanation facilities
can potentially drop both a user’s confidence and make the process of search more stressful. Aka “few takers for sausage factory tours.” (via ACM Queue)
"trust" entries
Four short links: 26 January 2016
Inequality, Conversational Commerce, Minsky Lectures, and Trust vs Transparency
Four short links: 24 November 2015
Tabular Data, Distrusting Authority, Data is the Future, and Remote Working Challenges
- uitable — cute library for tabular data in console golang programs.
- Did Carnegie Mellon Attack Tor for the FBI? (Bruce Schneier) — The behavior of the researchers is reprehensible, but the real issue is that CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has lost its credibility as an honest broker. The researchers discovered this vulnerability and submitted it to CERT. Neither the researchers nor CERT disclosed this vulnerability to the Tor Project. Instead, the researchers apparently used this vulnerability to deanonymize a large number of hidden service visitors and provide the information to the FBI. Does anyone still trust CERT to behave in the Internet’s best interests? Analogous to the CIA organizing a fake vaccination drive to get close to Osama. “Intelligence” agencies.
- Google Open-Sourcing TensorFlow Shows AI’s Future is Data not Code (Wired) — something we’ve been saying for a long time.
- Challenges of Working Remote (Moishe Lettvin) — the things that make working remote hard aren’t, primarily, logistical; they’re emotional.
Four short links: 22 September 2014
OS X Javascript, Social Key Party, E-Fail, and Microservices Testing
- Significance of Javascript For OS X Scripting — not just for shell scripting-type automation, now you can build Cocoa applications with Javascript. This is huge.
- keybase.io — social media as trust vector.
- I Banned E-Mail At My Company — Email should not be used to share information. Especially if that information is a resource that might be useful again in the future.
- Building Microservices at Karma — The biggest challenge with microservices is testing. With a regular web application, an end-to-end test is easy: just click somewhere on the website, and see what changes in the database. But in our case, actions and eventual results are so far from another that it’s difficult to see exact cause and effect. A problem might bubble up from a chain, but where in the chain did it go wrong? It’s something we still haven’t solved.
The technical aspects of privacy
The first of three public workshops kicked off a conversation with the federal government on data privacy in the US.
Thrust into controversy by Edward Snowden’s first revelations last year, President Obama belatedly welcomed a “conversation” about privacy. As cynical as you may feel about US spying, that conversation with the federal government has now begun. In particular, the first of three public workshops took place Monday at MIT.
Given the locale, a focus on the technical aspects of privacy was appropriate for this discussion. Speakers cheered about the value of data (invoking the “big data” buzzword often), delineated the trade-offs between accumulating useful data and preserving privacy, and introduced technologies that could analyze encrypted data without revealing facts about individuals. Two more workshops will be held in other cities, one focusing on ethics and the other on law. Read more…
The Direct Project has teeth, but it needs pseudonymity
How patient pseudonyms can inspire trust in the Direct Project's network.
Yesterday, Meaningful Use Stage 2 was released.
You can read the final rule here and you can read the announcement here.
As we read and parse the 900 or so pages of government-issued goodness, you can expect lots of commentary and discussion. Geek Doctor already has a summary and Motorcycle Guy can be expected to help us all parse the various health IT standards that have been newly blessed. Expect Brian Ahier to also be worth reading over the next couple of days.
I just wanted to highlight one thing about the newly released rules. As suspected, the actual use of the Direct Project will be a requirement. That means certified electronic health record (EHR) systems will have to implement it, and doctors and hospitals will have to exchange data with it. Awesome.
More importantly, this will be the first health IT interoperability standard with teeth. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be setting up an interoperability test server. It will not be enough to say that you support Direct. People will have to prove it. I love it. This has been the problem with Health Level 7 et al for years. No central standard for testing always means an unreliable and weak standard. Make no mistake, this is a critical and important move from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
Preview of HIMSS 2012
Collaboration, trust in platforms, and application of social media are key health IT trends.
Brian Ahier says we're at a pivotal moment for healthcare and health IT. Many of the core issues that will shape these domains in the years to come will be discussed at the upcoming Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.
The end of social
When you take the friction out of sharing, you also remove the value.
If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if sharing is nothing more than a social application feed that's constantly updated without your volition, then it's just another form of spam.
More that sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity
After
posting some thoughts
a month ago about Erving Goffman’s classic sociological text, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I heard from a reader who
urged me to try out a deeper work of Goffman’s, Frame
Analysis (Harper Colophon, 1974). This blog presents the thoughts
that came to mind as I made my way through that long and rambling
work. Although the Internet tends to strip away the external
meanings Goffman recorded, we still bring our real-life frameworks
into online interactions.
What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity
I just finished Erving Goffman’s classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A friend told me to read this for an exploration into what “identity” means online, and I did find that the book offers some useful frameworks. It helps us understand the contradictory effects of presenting ourselves online, and identify the opportunities and dangers.
Vendor Relationship Management workshop
Nobody knows you as well as you do. Or do they? Let's run a test. Do you
know what percentage of your food bill went to processed products? Or
what type of coupons (store coupons, newspaper coupons, etc.) is most
likely to get you to switch brands? I bet someone out there knows.This kind of data mining is the modern companion to Customer Relations Management, which is the science of understanding customers and trying to get repeat business. CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies
with the vendor. A Vendor Relationship Management workshop at
Harvard looked at what it would take to leave control with the
customers.