The Internet of Infomercials: Datasphere Thumbtypers Fret
November 30, 2020
I found “The Ad-Based Internet Is About to Collapse. What Comes Next?” interesting because of two points. The first was this passage:
For example, even as the value of the digital ad industry was continuing to rise, the average clickthrough rate on Google’s display ads fell to 0.46% in 2018, ad fraud was expected to jump 21% to $42 billion in 2019, and a Google study found 56% of its display ads may not even be seen by a human. These stats suggest the product being sold is not nearly as effective or valuable as many purchasers of digital ads believe it to be.
Massive hucksterism. Got it.
And how about a fix to the Internet of Infomercials? Try this:
Logic editor Ben Tarnoff suggests that the proper organizational structure would depend on the scale of the service. In some cases, cooperatives would be ideal.
Several observations:
- The author is describing external characteristics of online information, not the dynamics of the datasphere
- Cooperation is an interesting idea; however, in a datasphere, cooperation is not the “it takes a village” fairy tale
The nature of online is now being considered by thumbtypers. News flash: It’s too late to pull disconnect. Goldfish in a fish bowl accept their environment as the norm. Replace the glass container with zeros and ones and what do you get? Fish in one environment trying to figure out another environment without the means to figure out what’s TikTok-ing, Parler-ing, and Facebook-ing.
Stephen E Arnold, November 30, 2020
New York Times Divulges Core Trade Secret by Recycling Old News
November 27, 2020
The New York Times published a detailed explanation of one of its crown jewels, an honest to goodness trade secret. The news appears on page A2 of the November 26, 2020, newspaper of record. Some may quibble with today’s dump of secret information, but apparently the Gray Lady was not will to let old news rot from indifference. A version of today’s announcement appeared in May 2020 here.
What was this Eureka moment? Here’s the clue:
A Wirecutter Obsession: Spreadsheets
Yes, a digital page with rows and columns. Yep, there was a crude precursor in the distant past by an alleged Babylonian scribe. There there was LANPAR just 50 years ago. But the technology remained undiscovered but for a few trivial products like VisiCalc, 1-2-3, and every MBA’s touchstone, Excel.
Crowing like a coq galois, I noted this statement:
Wirecutter journalists have to be data nerds.
With such a momentous revelation appearing on a day when many fierce but technologically challenged competitors doing the faire le pont, the NYT may be able to recover from this inadvertent recycling of trade secrets.
Button up, people. This is not the slow moving era of Yellow Journalism. This is thumb typing time for those too busy to do “real news.”
But a spreadsheet? Brilliant. Who said invention was dead in the US of A?
But the NYT should be worried. The Norwegian chicken producer Norsk Kylling is shifting from Excel to Info Cloud Suite. Catch up with those chickens so another rooster crow can grace the Gray Lady’s barnyard. But wait! Maybe the NYT uses Oracle, Google, or possibly green ledger paper?
Stephen E Arnold, November 27, 2020
The Middle Kingdom Aims for Chip Design Dominance
November 27, 2020
No big deal. Just one more example of technological diffusion. Well, that’s a positive way to explain what’s going on. “China Aims to Shake US Grip on Chip Design Tools” reports:
Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software, founded in May, hired a high-ranking, China-based R&D executive from Synopsys in late October, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The executive worked for the U.S. company for nearly two decades, they said. Shanghai Hejian Industrial Software is backed by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission Of Shanghai Municipal Government and renowned Chinese venture capital firm Summitview Capital, according to online disclosures by the company. The third startup, Amedac, was founded in September 2019 by Chieh Ni, a former vice president of Synopsys China who worked with the U.S. company for 10 years. Synopsys, moreover, holds a more than 20% stake in the startup and Ge Qun, global senior vice president at Synopsys and chairman of its China operations, serves as one of the board directors at Amedac. Other key investors of Amedac include Summitview Capital, and the state-owned Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
What’s up? The Middle Kingdom crowd wants to become the chow chow of chip design. Not familiar with these fun beasts? Why not get acquainted?
The former employees of US chip design companies are likely to rely on these fine animals to protect their labs, meeting rooms, and manufacturing facilities? One never knows when the Chihuahuas from the US Department of Commerce will want to romp.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2020
Supercomputer League Tables Shift
November 19, 2020
I noted “Japan’s Fugaku Keeps Position As Fastest Supercomputer.” There were two items of interest in the write up.
First, the machine:
performed over 442 quadrillion computations per second, around three times faster than the Summit system developed by the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Second, the chips in the Fugaku were Fujitsu’s. These may be the the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor based on the ARM technology.
Intel and IBM are arm wrestling maybe?
Stephen E Arnold, November 19, 2020
Infodemic: Another Facet of Good Old 2020
November 12, 2020
It is difficult to locate non political, non Covid, and non frightening information. I read “Misinformation in the New Normal in a technology publication.” The essay is descriptive; that is, one does not solve a problem or spell out a fix. It’s like a florid passage in James Fennimore Cooper’s novels. There were some factoids in the essay; for example:
According to one piece of research, websites spreading misinformation about the pandemic received nearly half a billion views via Facebook in April alone…
Source? Not stated.
I also noted this statement in the write up:
As defensive measures evolve, so do the attacks, and the further development of deep fake technology is a worrying growth area for misinformation campaigns. Like fake domains, these altered recordings aim to create a veneer of trust in order to seed bad or dangerous information – but deep fakes are now around five years ahead, in technological development terms, of our ability to defend against them.
Five years? That’s another interesting number: 2025. And the lingo like infodemic? Snappy.
I have added the word “infodemic” to my list of interesting neologisms which contain gems like these: neurosymbolic AI, perception hacks, digital detox, and dissonance score.
But the article “Can the Law Stop Internet Bots from Undressing You?” raises another viewpoint about online data; specifically:
For women and men over the age of 18, the production of a sexual pseudo-image of a person is not in itself illegal under international law or in the UK, even if it is produced and distributed without the consent of the person portrayed in the image.
Have government regulators failed? Have educators been unable to impart ethical values to students? Have clever people embraced the methods of some Silicon Valley-type wizards?
Problem solved in 2025?
Stephen E Arnold, November 12, 2020
NASA and Software Integration
November 6, 2020
I spotted “NASA’s New Rocket Would Be the Most Powerful Ever. But It’s the Software That Has Some Officials Worried.” The issue is successful integration. Here are the companies building the principal propulsion systems:
- Aerojet Rocketdyne (the Super Strypi launch vehicle)
- Boeing (yep, the 737 Max outfit)
- Lockheed Martin (the F-35 outfit)
- Northrop Grumman (the Zuma payload detacher issue)
- United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation).
The write up raises the question, “Will the software developed by the companies work in a smoothly, integrated, coordinated way?”
The answer should be, “Yes. Absolutely.”
The answer is, “Each subsystem works within its test environment.”
The article contains these statements:
All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested. At an ASAP meeting last month, Paul Hill, a member of the panel and a former flight and mission operations director at the agency, said the “panel has great concern about the end-to-end integrated test capability and plans, especially for flight software.” Instead of one comprehensive avionics and software test to mimic flight, he said, there is “instead multiple and separate labs; emulators and simulations are being used to test subsets of the software.”
The proof of successful integration and coordinate will arrive at lift off it seems.
A Boeing vice president John Shannon is quoted in the article:
Shannon said the systems have been “completed, tested in integration facilities at [NASA’s] Marshall Space Flight Center. We’ve had independent verification and validation on it to show that it works well with the flight software and the stand controller software. And it’s all all ready to go.”
Okay.
Stephen E Arnold, November 6, 2020
Confidence in US Education: 46 Companies Have Doubts
November 3, 2020
I read “Top 48 US Companies Files Legal Challenge to Block H-1B Visa Changes.” The write up states:
Nearly 46 leading US companies and business organizations, including tech giants Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook, representing and working with key sectors of the US economy, have filed an amicus brief that supports a legal challenge to block upcoming rule changes to H-1B visa eligibility.
Another interesting factoid:
The companies said that the new DHS rules will dramatically reduce US businesses’ ability to hire these skilled foreign workers—one senior DHS official estimated that they will render ineligible more than one-third of petitions for H-1B visas.
What does this suggest about the flow of talent from the US education system? How are those online classes working out?
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2020
Distance Learning? Works Well, Right?
October 29, 2020
I spotted this article from the ever reliable “real” news outfit Daily Mail: “Boy, 9, Is Forced to Sit on Concrete Outside His Closed Elementary School with His Laptop on a Cardboard Box Because His Family Can’t Afford Wi-Fi for Online Classes.” The write includes a story of the young boy kneeling in front of a cardboard box and using his laptop. The desk looks like a cardboard box.
Observations:
- Online access is not available to some students
- The young man — if the write up is “real” — wants to learn
- The modern world may offer many delights to those who can afford them. To those with fewer resources, life is not a bowl of cherries.
The cost of inequality can be considered in the context of knowledge lost. Perhaps the whiz kid economists who preach efficiency, fast twitch action, and Austrian economic theory can solve this young man’s problem?
No wait.
Apparently an individual with resources stepped forward and made online access possible.
That’s the spirit: Asset reallocation in action. Plus, perhaps we should expect the young boy to do more: Build a desk out of scrap wood, learn to code so he can piggyback on a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, or just embrace street crime?
I think education is a better option.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2020
Nanodrone Fluid Propulsion
October 16, 2020
DarkCyber has been nosing around the technologies used in drones. Most attention seems to be directed at unmanned aerial systems. However, drones which operate in water are an important research area for a number of use cases; for example, targeted delivery of pathogens.
“What Tiny Surfing Robots Teach Us About Surface Tension” contains a number of interesting factoids. However, the passage which captured the attention of a DarkCyber researcher was:
That knowledge has led Masoud [the Michigan professor] to continue analyzing the propulsion behavior of diminutive robots — only several microns in size — and the Marangoni effect, which is the transfer of mass and momentum due to a gradient of surface tension at the interface between two fluids. In addition to serving as an explanation for tears of wine, the Marangoni effect helps circuit manufacturers dry silicon wafers and can be applied to grow nanotubes in ordered arrays.
The research also suggests was to use swarms of micro-sized drones to operate in swarms. Maybe targeted pathogen delivery?
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Why Software Is Getting Worse
October 5, 2020
I have noticed that certain popular applications are getting harder to use, less reliable, and increasingly difficult to remediate. Examples range from the Google Maps interface to Flipboard. I suppose those individuals who use these applications frequently find their hidden functions delightful. I just walk away.
Now there’s an explanation of sort. Navigate to “Devs Are Managing 100x More Code Now Than They Did in 2010.” As I recall, software was flakey in 2010, but if the information in the article is accurate, the slide downhill is accelerating.
The write up explains:
Some of this code growth can be explained by increasingly complex code, but much of it comes from an increase in the diversity of platforms and tools used. Modern development—particularly Web development—generally means amalgams of many different platforms, libraries, and dependencies. The developers surveyed reported increases in the number of supported architectures, devices, languages, repositories, and more.
More code, more complexity and what do you get?
Interfaces that confuse the user. Weird error messages that point to nothing comprehensible. Certified upgrades that don’t install.
Is there a fix? Sure, just like the fix for the deteriorating physical infrastructure of roads and bridges.
Talk, promises, and budget discussions.
The result? Downhill fast, folks.
Stephen E Arnold, October 5, 2020
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