Kindle: There Are Free Options
August 7, 2018
Here’s a handy resource for anyone with an Amazon Kindle e-reader—PCWorld shares “Where to Find Free Books for our Amazon Kindle.” You may want to make a note of this because one thing is for sure—you won’t find this list via Amazon. Reporter Séamus Bellamy introduces:
“When you own an Amazon Kindle, the cost of supporting a voracious reading habit can get very steep, very quickly. A quick glance at Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Month shows that a decent read can set you back between $13 and $15 for a Kindle edition book. Sure, Amazon offers deals on great e-books, but waiting for a deal could take forever. Many titles can be had for two bucks or less, but it takes work to find the gems among the dross. What you need are some solid options for finding free, absorbing content to devour on your Kindle. We’re more than happy to point you in the right direction. (And if you need a new e-reader, find one among our reviews of the best Kindles.)”
The first two sources on the list, Project Gutenberg and OverDrive, offer free content. Founded by the creator of e-books, Michael Hart, it is no exaggeration to say Project Gutenberg has made a crusade of digitizing public-domain books. Meanwhile, OverDrive allows anyone who holds a card from a (participating) public library to access their facilities’ digital collection. The next two items are actually little-touted Amazon features: It turns out you can “loan” someone a Kindle e-book for 2 weeks, during which time they can view it but you cannot. Furthermore, two adults from each household may freely share each e-book purchased form the Kindle store. See the article for more on each of these options, including click-by-click instructions for the latter two.
Cynthia Murrell, August 8, 2018
Amazon and Special Data
August 6, 2018
Amazon Web Services is ubiquitous with cloud computing and big data power. We all know dozens of companies use these tools, but until recently it was all a little hazy as to who was and how. But, a Silicon Angle gives us some tea leaves to read. According to the story, “In Conversation With: AWS Serverless Chief Tim Wagner Peers at the Future of Cloud Computing:”
“If you have traded any stocks, or had any stocks traded in your behalf, FINRA processes those stock trades at the end of the closing day using Lambda, so there’s a big chance here that the trade you made was evaluated and validated by FINRA using Lambda. Thomson Reuters does four thousand transactions every second with it, Fannie Mae runs its 20 million mortgage calculations through there. So these are not ancillary, some line-of-business, or over-in-the-marketing-department kinds of pieces These are mission-critical software that is now tied at the hip to a serverless architecture.”
This is significant, because we get a little first hand confirmation of AWS client base. Doing a little more research, it suddenly comes as no shock that Fannie Mae reported big earnings in its last quarter and Thomson Reuters is venturing into new territories. It’s fascinating to finally get to put a story to AWS’ offerings and it would not shock us if more big name corporations jump on board.
Quick question: What new revenue opportunities do these data create?
Patrick Roland, August 6, 2018
Math: The New Reality for Cryptocurrency Believers?
August 3, 2018
A lot of really smart people believe they can predict the future with math. Before you laugh, consider that meteorologists study weather patterns to predict the weather, biologists studies a tumor’s growth trajectory to determine future growth, and financial analysts predict the stock market’s up and downs. Phys.org takes a look at how scientists are using math to track down patterns to then predict the future: “Can Math Predict What You Do Next?”
Guess what the article is talking about? Big data and predictive analytics! It explains how retailers like Amazon use predictive analytics to predict what products consumers want next. Online advertisers are doing it to! Wow! This is new stuff…not, but the information on mathematical machine learning puts some new thoughts out there.
Machine learning algorithms can accurately predict Supreme Court outcomes, suicide attempts, and terrorist attacks. Machine learning is not perfectly accurate:
“As technology develops, scientists may find that we can predict human behavior rather well in one area, while still lacking in another. It’s very difficult to give an overall sense of the limitations. For instance, facial recognition may be easier to emulate because vision is one of many human sensory processing systems, or because there are only so many ways faces can differ. On the other hand, predicting voting behavior, especially based on the 2016 presidential election, is quite another story. There are many complex and not yet understood reasons why humans do what they do.”
One example is the reassuring human behavior of using information for personal gain. Combine opportunity, cleverness, and greed, and you end up with cryptocurrency markets struggling with insider trading. Math seems to contribute to the human calculus.
Whitney Grace, August 3, 2018
Google: A Digital Deer Stalker
August 2, 2018
The digital Natty Bumpos and Chingachcooks are on the job some pundits believe. In fact, Beyond Search has learned that some skeptical souls think Google is following you, me, heck, everyone.
We’ve all been suspecting that we are being digitally followed for quite some time now. Ever since smart phones started getting smarter than us, there’s been that suspicion. Recently, Google confirmed this but with an interesting caveat. We learned more from an in-depth IB Times story, “Tech Expert Explains How Google Maps Tracks Real Time Traffic.”
According to the story:
“Google Maps keeps on tapping the mobile phones of millions of people who keep their location services “ON” while they are on roads without hampering the security and privacy of the users. This data tracks the average speed at which the sedans are moving to a particular location.”
That’s a tough realization to come to. Yes, our driving is being intermittently watched, but the result is a better navigation tool. For example, Waze recently started using more artificial intelligence to its program. The plan is that the already crowd-sourced material from the driving app will be enhanced by predictive analytics and artificial intelligence in order to create a user experience that hopefully takes the edge off gridlock. What are your thoughts on this? We are, frankly, a little torn between beating our heads against the steering wheel in traffic and wanting to toss our phone out the window and live off the grid.
Nifty idea. Probably impossible for most individuals working, going online, using credit cards, sending text messages, etc.
Patrick Roland, August 2, 2018
Factualities: Believe Them or Not
August 1, 2018
Factualities quantify our online world. Today’s data:
- 80 percent of Dark Web visits relate to child porn. Source: Wired
- When organizations do not restrict any internet activity, over half of employees (58 percent) spend at least four hours per week, on Web sites unrelated to their job. Lost time: Just 26 work days every 12 months. Source: ZDNet
- Silicon Valley families making $117,000 are considered low income. Source: Boing Boing
- Dark Web boosts ecommerce fraud by 30 percent. Source: Forex
- The cost of UK biometric residence permits: About $30. Cheap some say. Source: The Register
Stephen E Arnold, August 1, 2018
Silos Are a Natural Consequence of Information: Learn to Love Them
July 30, 2018
How To Eradicate Unnecessary Data Silos
A piece at the SmartDataCollective explains “How to Eliminate Silos in Company-Wide Data Analytics.” Writer Larry Alton explains:
“Silos emerge when a cluster of individuals in your company (usually within a specific department) have trouble communicating with, or collaborating with another cluster of individuals in your company (usually within another department). In some ways, this is a natural result of building a company; if you want your sales team to focus on sales and your marketing team to focus on marketing, eventually, it will be difficult for your sales and marketing staff to collaborate on a mutual problem. But if you want your company’s data to be streamlined, accessible, and impactful to your organization’s bottom line, you’ll need to eliminate these silos, or at least mitigate their development.”
The piece lists the reasons silos are to be avoided and we agree, in general, with Alton’s points. However, we observe that data isolation by department is required in some sectors—intelligence, law enforcement, and pharmaceuticals, for example. Alton offers specific advice in his list, “How to Break Silos Down,” so see the piece for that info.
The problem, however, is that data silos are a fact of life in many organizations. Examples range from the 23andMe data now shared with a major pharmaceutical company to information in the possession of an attorney allegedly bound by confidentiality obligations. The idea that federating a wide range of data is a natural condition goes against individual and corporate behavior.
Talk about data silos is one thing. Delivering a giant data lake with open access to those with permission to view the data is another. When a new project gets off the ground, how are the data handled? The answer, “In a silo.” Toss in a government requirement for secrecy or a corporate rule about secret drug research, and you have silos.
Who doesn’t want silos?
Cynthia Murrell, July 30, 2018
Free Great Books Available
July 26, 2018
Amazon may not be able to replace libraries…yet. It was a comparatively short time ago that some of the world’s brightest thinkers thought the Internet could be a utopian idea that shared knowledge and kindness and funny cat videos. Fast forward to now and the Internet is a place mostly filled with ads, fake facts and fakier news, social media, social media trolls, identity thieves, vendors of baby data, and cat videos. However, it’s not all a minefield, because the knowledge category is actually becoming a reality, thanks to inventive services like Harvard’s new site, “My Harvard Classics.”
The site claims:
If you would like to download a PDF of any volume of the Harvard Classics you may do so for free.” And features massive texts from Homer, Plato, Ben Franklin and many of history’s brightest thinkers.
This is just one of several ways in which the academic world is opening up to this idea. The University of California libraries now offer open access search options, which offers a world of knowledge to anyone with an internet connection. It’s rare that we see stories of goodwill and genuine advancement when we talk about online activity and especially databases, so it’s good to bask in the glow that people are really taking full advantage of the online world in one respect.
By the way, most of the Harvard Classics are available via Amazon for a fee… of course.
Patrick Roland, July 26, 2018
How Do You Track an Amtrak Train?
July 25, 2018
Passenger trains are expensive and vulnerable to delays in most countries. Riding trains in the UK can be darned exciting. Amtrak, the outfit responsible for passenger trains in the US, has made it easier to figure out where a train is on its route. No more futile calls to the Amtrak 800 number or, if one lives in a city where there is an easy-t0-access train station with a human attendant, and no more visits to the Amtrak Web site for information. Forget Bing, Google, Qwant, and Yandex queries.
Navigate to Track a Train. This is an Amtrak service which answers this question:
When will a train arrive?
Here’s what the site looks like:
I clicked on the blue icons with arrows. These reveal information about a particular train. I selected North Dakota because there were two dots in the vast expanse of that region.
I also figured that unlike the Northeast corridor, the trains would be able to zoom along. Here’s what I learned when I clicked on the left hand east bound blue icon:
The train, which departed from Seattle, appears to be running a mere seven hours and 26 minutes behind schedule.
The purple dots which look like this provide one click views of trains in the heavily used north east corridor:
Click one of these purple icons and you see:
I used to ride the train between Washington and New York when I lived in DC. What’s notable about this information is that it does not provide the date and time of the information. But a tiny green flag explains that this train is on time. That’s a plus.
Several observations:
- The train track data is from July 23, and I clicked on July 25. Not exactly semi real time or remotely useful.
- Most of the Amtrak blue icons report that trains are running behind schedule. This begs the question, “Why not adjust the schedules to real world performance or, as some might suggest, non performance?
- For a big country, there are not many trains; for example, there is no service connecting Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis. Options worsen as one moves west. South Dakota, Wyoming, and Idaho? Better fly or drive?
Net net: The information on the map does not paint a particularly positive picture of Amtrak on time performance. The wonky date information makes it difficult to determine how fresh or how stale the information on the map is.
Maybe those super coach rides are worth checking out?
Stephen E Arnold, July 25, 2018
Facebook: It Does Do Interesting Things
July 11, 2018
Look at Facebook from the vantage point of a grandmother looking at her grandchildren, and Facebook looks one way. Check out the company as a developer with special access to Facebook users, and Facebook looks another.
I read “Russian Company Had Access to Facebook User Data Through Apps.” Then I read “Facebook Introduced Secretive New Developer Terms to Prevent Another Cambridge Analytica.” The headline seems encouraging.
Put these stories against the background of Facebook’s US$600,000 fine for its unintentional, wow-we-are-sorry Cambridge Analytica misadventure.
What is Facebook?
In the US, Facebook is a success story, operating like any well oiled, money making machine. Outside the US, the UK and EU may see the firm differently. Companies do not get fined if it stays within the bright white lines of laws and regulations.
The question is, “What’s the correct way to pursue revenue via online information services?”
The answer, it seems is to do whatever is expedient. Do what can be done and apologize if those bold actions run over a baby deer or take out a flock of geese focused on their computing devices.
What’s the trajectory of these “act first, apologize later” tactics?
For one thing, we have increasing censorship. China, it appears, has cracked down on some aspects of the digital life. Other countries dabble with information control. Iran and Turkey have been innovative.
The epicenter of “act now, apologize later” seems to be centered in a relatively small number of companies. So what’s not to like about secret developer deals and disruption? Think of the opportunities.
Stephen E Arnold, July 11, 2018
Data in One or Two Places: What Could Go Wrong?
July 11, 2018
Silos of data have become the term du jour for many folks thinking about search and machine learning. By piling all that info into one convenient place, we can accomplish amazing feats. However, as those silos get larger and start gobbling up smaller silos, what are we left with? This was a concern brought up in a recent Tech Dirt think piece, “The Death of Google Reader and the Rise of Silos.”
According to the story:
“Many people have pointed to the death of Google Reader as a point at which news reading online shifted from things like RSS feeds to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It might seem odd (or ironic) to bemoan a move by one of the companies now considered one of the major silos for killing off a product…”
While this piece holds a pseudo-funeral for Google Reader and, somewhat poignantly, points that this is the downfall of the Internet it overlooks the value of silos. Maybe it’s not all so bad?
That’s what one commentator for the Daily Journal pointed out remarking on the amount of innovation that has come about as a result of these mega silos. Clearly, there’s no perfect balance and we suspect your opinion on silos depends on what industry you are in.
Federation of information seems like a good idea. But perhaps it is even better when federation occurs in two or three online structures? If data are online, those date are accurate. That’s one view.
Patrick Roland, July 11, 2018
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