Improving Information for Everyone
August 14, 2016
I love it when Facebook and Google take steps to improve information quality for everyone.
I noted “Facebook’s News Feed to Show Fewer Clickbait Headlines.” I thought the Facebook news feed was 100 percent beef. I learned:
The company receives thousands of complaints a day about clickbait, headlines that intentionally withhold information or mislead users to get people to click on them…
Thousands. I am impressed. Facebook is going to do some filtering to help its many happy users avoid clickbait, a concept which puzzles me. I noted:
Facebook created a system that identifies and classifies such headlines. It can then determine which pages or web domains post large amounts of clickbait and rank them lower in News Feed. Facebook routinely updates its algorithm for News Feed, the place most people see postings on the site, to show users what they are most interested in and encourage them to spend even more time on the site.
Clustering methods are readily available. I ask myself, “Why did Facebook provide streams of clickbait in the first place?”
On a related note, the Google released exclusive information to Time Warner, which once owned AOL and now owns a chunk of Hula. Google’s wizards have identified bad bits, which it calls “unwanted software.” The Googlers converted the phrase into UwS and then into the snappy term “ooze.”
Fortune informed me:
people bump into 60 million browser warnings for download attempts of unwanted software at unsafe Web pages every week.
Quite a surprise I assume. Google will definitely talk about “a really big problem.” Alas, Fortune was not able to provide information about what Mother Google will do to protect its users. Obviously the “real” journalists at Fortune did not find the question, “What are you going to do about this?” germane.
It is reassuring to know that Facebook and Google are improving the quality of the information each provides. Analytics and user feedback are important.
Stephen E Arnold, August 13, 2016
Google by the Sea: One Percenters Top 100 Hoe Down
August 13, 2016
I have no idea if “Fireworks, Ancient Ruins, and Celebrities: Inside Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Exclusive Conference in Italy” took place. It might be an elaborate virtual reality confection with After Effects magic to make a get together real. The article explains that Google had a three day conference for a number of average Joes and Janes. The location was Sicily, previously known as a mise en scène for certain criminal activities and the birthplace of Archimedes, a fellow who would have been a Googler if Google existed in 287 BCE. The write up points out that George Lucas was in attendance and looking suave. I checked out the photo, and I don’t think I would have used the word “suave.” The food included homemade pasta, wine and cheese tastings, live music, fireworks, and selfies. After reading the article and looking at the photos, I realized that grilling squirrel next to the pond filled with mine drainage was very similar to this Google hoe down. The local Lucas wandered over to my squirrel roast. He did not look suave. He looked as if he wanted to be some place else. I concluded that cooking squirrels was something the one percent of the one percenters probably would not enjoy. I noted that Google’s George Lucas’ eyes looked like the squirrel’s eyes when I tossed him / her into the pile of Kingsford briquettes. No CGI for me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 13, 2016
The Yahooing of Alphabet Google
August 12, 2016
I read “Google Isn’t Safe from Yahoo’s Fate.” The write up is a business school type analysis which reminded me of the inevitable decline of many businesses. Case studies pose MBAs to be to the thrills of success and the consequences of management missteps. I recall a book, published by a now lost and forgotten outfit, which talked about blind spots and management myopia. Humans have a tendency to make errors. That’s what makes life exciting. But I see a GooHoo trajectory.
I learned in this article:
Google is on the wrong side of major trends in the digital advertising industry: Google captures direct response dollars as digital ad spend shifts up the funnel, its focus is still on browsers and websites as engagement is moving into apps and feeds, Google is deeply dependent on search during a shift to serendipitous discovery and ads designed to interrupt the user’s attention are being replaced by advertising designed to engage them. Its competitor, Facebook, is on the right side of all these trends.
The Alphabet Google thing has not been able to hit home runs in social media in my opinion. The Google Facebook dust up exists, and it seems to me that Google is withdrawing from the field of social battle.
The write up informed me:
Google’s search advertising model is built on direct response in that it charges for search ads that people click on. In theory, this is an entirely transparent model: After all, advertisers only pay when the advertising works. What it conceals is that they are taking more credit (and charging more) for value that its ads didn’t deliver. By charging you for the click that follows a search, Google effectively takes credit for the entire funnel of purchase consideration that led you to type in the search and click on the link in the first place….But the ad itself didn’t create their purchase intent — it just takes credit for it. Google’s lower funnel ads are getting credit for upper-funnel effectiveness, in no small part because the latter is just too hard to measure.
Gartner Declares Microsoft a Winner
August 12, 2016
I read “Microsoft Is a Leader in 18 Gartner Magic Quadrants, Including Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.” Those folks at Microsoft should be darned proud of themselves. Receiving A grades in 18 Gartner Magic Quadrants is remarkable.
I noted this passage in the write up:
Microsoft is the only cloud computing vendor that is a Magic Quadrant Leader in all of the major cloud services categories, including IaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). These ratings place Microsoft in an enviable position above Amazon AWS, Salesforce, and Google. Looking at the following chart, we can see that Microsoft is a Leader in fully 18 different Magic Quadrants.
Yes, Microsoft stomps on Amazon. I can here the chant “We’re number one” now even though I am in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
What are those 18 Magic Quadrants? I think this is the list, but I can be wrong. My view is that Gartner’s experts are never, ever, ever incorrect in their objective analyses of leading vendors. Perish the thought that the Magic Quadrant is influenced by any subjective element. I shudder to think how subjectivity influencing ratings would rock the myriad consultants wherever they may work.
The 18 Magic Quadrants:
Application develop life cycle management or ADLM
Business intelligence and analytics platforms or BIAP
Cloud infrastructure as a service or CaaS
CRM customer engagement center or CRMCEC
Data warehouse and data management solutions for analytics or DWaDMSfA
Disaster recovery as a service or DRaaS
Enterprise content management or ECM
Horizontal portals or HP (Please, do not confuse the leadership outfit Microsoft with the struggling Hewlett Packard)
Identity as a service or IDaaS
Mobile application development platforms or MADP
Operational database management systems or ODBMS
Public cloud storage services or PCSS
Sales force automation or SFA
Unified communications or UC (Not to be confused with Google ooze)
Web conferencing or WC (Please, be careful with this acronym in the UK)
X86 server virtualization infrastructure or XSVI.
Frankly, the best acronym on this list, which is filled with impressive acronyms, is DWaDMSfA. However, I quite like UC which may be pronounced “uck” and WC. But for the connotation of a loo, WC is outstanding. I know that Microsoft is the all time champ of the enterprise.
Perhaps Amazon will pick up its marbles and focus on space travel and selling weird voice activated surveillance devices? Kudos to Microsoft for its stellar and totally objective achievement.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2016
Why Search Does Not Change Too Much: Tech Debt Is a Partial Answer
August 12, 2016
I read “The Human Cost of Tech Debt.” The write up picks up the theme about the amount of money needed to remediate engineering mistakes, bugs, and short cuts. The cost of keeping an original system in step with newer market entrants’ products adds another burden.
The write up is interesting and includes some original art. Even though the art is good, the information presented is better; for example:
For a manager, a code base high in technical debt means that feature delivery slows to a crawl, which creates a lot of frustration and awkward moments in conversation about business capability. For a developer, this frustration is even more acute. Nobody likes working with a significant handicap and being unproductive day after day, and that is exactly what this sort of codebase means for developers. Each day they go to the office knowing that it’s going to take the better part of a day to do something simple like add a checkbox to a form. They know that they’re going to have to manufacture endless explanations for why seemingly simple things take them a long time. When new developers are hired or consultants brought in, they know that they’re going to have to face confused looks, followed by those newbies trying to hide mild contempt.
My interest is search and content processing. I asked myself, “Why are search and retrieval systems better than they were in 1975. When I queried the RECON system, I was able to find specific documents which contained information matching the terms in my query. Four decades ago, I could generate a useful result set. The bummer was that the information appeared on weird thermal printer paper. But I usually found the answer to my question in a fraction of the time required for me to run a query on my Windows machine or my Mac.
What’s up?
My view is that search and retrieval tends to be a recycling business. The same basic systems and methods are used again and again. The innovations are wrappers. But to make search more user friendly, add ons look at a user’s query history and behind the scenes filter the results to match the history.
The shift to mobile has been translated to providing results that other people have found useful. Want a pizza? You can find one, but if you want Cuban food in Washington, DC, you may find that the mapping service does not include a popular restaurant for reasons which may be related to advertising expenditures.
We ran a series of queries across five Dark Web search and retrieval systems. None of the systems delivered high precision and high recall results. In order to find certain large sites, manual review and one-at-a-time clicking and review were needed to locate what we were querying.
Regular Web or Dark Web. Online search has discarded useful AND, OR, NOT functions, date and time stamps, and any concern about revealing editorial or filtering postures to a user.
Technological debt explains that most search outfits lack the money to deliver a Class A solution. What about the outfits with oodles of dough and plenty of programmers? The desire and need to improve search is not a management priority.
Some vendors mobile search operates from a vendor’s copy of the indexed sites. Easy, computationally less expensive, and good enough.
Tech debt is a partial explanation for the sad state of online search at this time.
Stephen E Arnold, August 12, 2016
These Are the False Records of the Starship Google
August 12, 2016
Star Trek technology was/is designed by prop masters and special effects artists based on preconceived notations of the time. The original Trek series ran on analog, while the franchise reboot has holograms and streamlined ships free of the 1960s “groovy” design. Google wants to make Star Trek technology a reality and in manner ways they have with a search engine and a digital assistant that responds to vocal commands. Is Google getting too big for its britches, however? STAT asked the question in its story, “’Silicon Valley Arrogance’? Google Misfires As It Strives To Turn Star Trek Fiction Into Reality.”
Google wanted to create the Star Trek tricorder, a handheld computer that records, scans, and processes any type of data from soil samples to medical information. Google created a biotech venture, Verily Life Sciences, to invent a cancer scanning tricorder, but the project is not doing so well. The cancer tricorder is only one example of Google’s misfire in medical technology. Verily appears to be working on projects that are more in the realm of science fantasy and are used as marketing devices to promote Google as the “technology company of the future.”
Google wants to maker new scientific inroads in medical technology, pulling on their expertise with big data and their initiative:
“’Part of the Silicon Valley ethos is about changing the world, about disruptive technology, about ignoring existing business models,’ and ‘taking on grand challenges,’ …
‘That’s admirable,’…but in Verily’s case, ‘it also feels pretty quixotic.’”
Fantasy drives innovation, which is why science fiction series like Star Trek are inspiration. Much of the technology from the original Trek series and later installations are available now, but we are still far from making everything from the show a reality. We should not halt experimentation on new technology, but big claims like Google’s are probably best kept silent until there is a working prototype.
Whitney Grace, August 12, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
USAGov Wants More Followers on Snapchat
August 12, 2016
The article on GCN titled Tracking the Ephemeral: USAGov’s Plan for Snapchat portrays the somewhat desperate attempts of the government to reach out to millennials. Perhaps shocking to non-users of the self-immolating picture app, Snapchat claims over a hundred million active users each day, mostly comprised of 13 to 34 year olds. The General Service Administration of USAGov plans to use Snapchat to study the success of their outreach like how many followers they receive and how many views their content gets. The article mentions,
“And while the videos and multimedia that make up “Snapchat stories” disappear after just 24 hours, the USAGov team believes the engagement metrics will provide lasting value. Snapchat lets account owners see how many people are watching each story, if they watch the whole story and when and where they stop before it’s over — allowing USAGov to analyze what kind of content works best.”
If you are wondering how this plan is affected by the Federal Records Acts which stipulates documentation of content, GSA is way ahead of you with a strategy of downloading each story and saving it as a record. All in all the government is coming across as a somewhat clingy boyfriend trying to find out what is up with his ex by using her favorite social media outlet. Not a great look for the US government. But at least they aren’t using ChatRoulette.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 12, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
Mixpanel Essay Contains Several Smart Software Gems
August 11, 2016
I read “The Hard Thing about Machine Learning.” The essay explains the history of machine learning at Mixpanel. Mixpanel is a business analytics company. Embedded in the write up are several observations which I thought warranted highlighting.
The first point is the blunt reminded that machine learning requires humans—typically humans with specialist skills—to make smart software work as expected. The humans have to figure out what problem they and the numerical recipes are supposed to solve. Mixpanel says:
machine learning isn’t some sentient robot that does this all on its own. Behind every good machine learning model is a team of engineers that took a long thoughtful look at the problem and crafted the right model that will get better at solving the problem the more it encounters it. And finding that problem and crafting the right model is what makes machine learning really hard.
The second pink circle in my copy of the essay corralled this observation:
The broader the problem, the more universal the model needs to be. But the more universal the model, the less accurate it is for each particular instance. The hard part of machine learning is thinking about a problem critically, crafting a model to solve the problem, finding how that model breaks, and then updating it to work better. A universal model can’t do that.
I think this means that machine learning works on quite narrow, generally tidy problems. Anyone who has worked with the mid 1990s Autonomy IDOL system knows that as content flows into a properly trained system, that “properly trained” system can start to throw some imprecise and off-point outputs. The fix is to retrain the system on a properly narrowed data set. Failure to do this would cause users to scratch their heads because they could not figure out how their query about computer terminals generated outputs about railroad costs. The key is the word “terminal” and increasingly diverse content flowing into the system.
The third point received a check mark from this intrepid reader:
Correlation does not imply causation.
Interesting. I think one of my college professors in 1962 made a similar statement. Pricing for Mixpanel begins at $600 per month for four million data points.
Stephen E Arnold, August 11, 2016
IBM: Winning Is Everything in Cloud Computing and Revenues
August 11, 2016
I love testosterone charged sports talk. I wish there were more of it from large companies with an enviable record. Consider IBM. I think it is 16 consecutive quarters of revenue declines. Yes, a crown of sorts.
I read “IBM’s Cloud CTO: We’re in This Game to Win.” I read these thrilling words of hope and revenue optimism:
“We knew it was a massive opportunity for IBM, but not in a way that necessarily fit our mold,” said Jim Comfort, who is now CTO for IBM Cloud. “Every dimension of our business model would change — we knew that going in…. Our platform is cloud,” Comfort said. “It’s not just that we’re doing some cloud services, but that everything we do will be cloud-delivered. That’s a declarative statement — that’s fundamental…. “We understand what matters from the perspective of industries,” Comfort said. “AWS and Google don’t; Microsoft does in certain domains.”
The only hitch in the git along is everyone’s favorite world’s smartest person, Jeff Bezos, quant and space enthusiast. It appears that Amazon’s cloud business is either number one or very close to being number one. (It depends on how one counts, of course.)
The fact is that IBM is into the mainframe thing. IBM has Watson to answer this question, “How can IBM close the gap with Amazon?” And “How can IBM thwart the new Oracle NetSuite cloud thing?” And “What happens if Google shifts its attention from solving death and flying loon balloons to its cloud services?
IBM is in the game to win. Yep, the only problem is that IBM is losing revenues. Hope springs eternal even at ageing technology companies trying really hard to find substantial, sustainable, and profitable revenue streams. The race may be between IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Knocking off Amazon because it doesn’t understand the customer is like the junior college coach who thinks he can run an NFL coaching operation. Long shot. What do you think Watson? Watson, Watson, come here I need you.
Stephen E Arnold, August 11, 2016
No Dark Web Necessary
August 11, 2016
Do increased Facebook restrictions on hate speech and illegal activity send those users straight to the Dark Web? From The Atlantic comes and article entitled, American Neo-Nazis Are on Russia’s Facebook, which hints that is not always the case. This piece explains that location of an online group called “United Aryan Front” moved from Facebook to a Russia’s version of Facebook: VKontakte. The article describes a shift to cyber racism,
The move to VK is part of the growing tendency of white supremacists to interact in online forums, rather than through real-life groups like the KKK, according to Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-terror Intelligence Project. Through the early 2000s, skinheads and other groups would host dozens of events per year with hundreds of attendees, she says, but now there are only a handful of those rallies each year. “People online are talking about the same kinds of things that used to happen at the rallies, but now they’re doing it completely through the web,” she said.
It is interesting to consider the spaces people choose, or are forced into, for conducting ill-intentioned activities. Even when Facebook cracks down on it, hate speech amongst other activities is not relegated solely to the Dark Web. While organized online hate speech analogous to rallies may be experiencing a surge in the online world, rallies are not the only avenue for real-world racism. At the core of this article, like many we cover on the Dark Web, is a question about the relationship between place and malicious activity.
Megan Feil, August 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden/Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
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