Some Free Math Books
December 21, 2019
Dana C. Ernst has assembled a list of free and open source math texts. The list is useful and contains a range of information. Books are grouped by category unlike the Barnes & Noble and Amazon approaches of ignoring meaningful topic clusters. Want Calculus. You get calculus, not a book priced at $750. And for the exercise physiologists, lawyers, and home economics enthusiasts, the list includes “Introductory Differential Equations Using Sage.” No, sage is not a spice. Too bad the link is dead, but the Mathematical Association of America will sell David Joyner and Marshall Hampton’s book for just $60. You can access the list at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2019
Google May Lose the Gaming Wars
December 20, 2019
Gaming used to be a cottage industry, but things have changed to the tune of billions of dollars and the existence of professional gamer as an occupation. Gamers have evolved into sophisticated consumers (arguably) and they are particular about what they play. The industry is dominated by Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Google wants a piece of the action. Slash Gear shares that, “Google Stadia’s Rocky Roll-Out Continues With Free Fame Refunds.”
Gamers are not embracing Google Stadia and reports are streaming in about negative experiences. Two of the Stadia’s first releases was Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition and Farming Simulator 19 for purchase, but then they were released for free with the Stadia Pro membership. Gamers were unhappy with that development and Stadia has offered refunds. New developments in gaming are always rocky:
“Teething problems for any new service, never mind one as ambitious as Stadia, are to be expected. Still, Google’s track record with its cloud gaming platform doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. The company’s inability to keep its earliest-adopters happy is a testament to how not to successfully launch, and its handling of things like Stadia Pro titles also leaves much to be desired.”
Stadia is a great idea in theory, but execution is more complicated. Low latency gaming with HD graphics is not plausible with current technology, but as technology continues to improve it will be.
Reality and real people are different from demonstrations under controlled conditions. The real world includes humans, Microsoft Mixer, Amazon Twitch, and other non lab things.
Whitney Grace, December 20, 2019
About That Google-Rejected Project Maven
December 20, 2019
Anyone familiar with data-systems firm Palantir knows the company makes no apologies for supporting the U.S. military (among others) with their platforms. So it comes as no surprise that it is picking up where Google left off— The Next Web shares their “Report: Palantir Took Over Project Maven, the Military AI Program Too Unethical for Google.” Writer Tristan Greene explains:
“Project Maven, for those unfamiliar, is a Pentagon program to build an AI-powered surveillance platform for unmanned aerial vehicles. Basically, the job is to build a system for the US military to deploy and monitor autonomous drones. This system would, supposedly, give the government real-time battlefield command and control and the ability to track, tag, and spy on targets without human involvement. The limited, unclassified information available makes it appear as though the project stops just short of functioning as an AI weapons system capable of firing on self-designated targets as they become available in the battle space. …
“The Pentagon didn’t have to look very far to find a company willing to pick up where Google‘s ethics left off. Palantir, the company that powers ICE and CBP’s surveillance networks and builds software for police that circumvents the warrant process, is reportedly chugging away on Project Maven.”
We’re reminded Palantir founder Peter Thiel expressed disdain for Google after it dropped Maven following employee protest. Not only has Thiel insisted tech companies are honor bound to help the government with, seemingly, whatever it asks, he also points out Google’s history of working with the Chinese government. Greene notes that, though “we stand on the cusp of AI-powered warfare,” our federal government has yet to develop an official policy on the ethics of military use of AI. The possibilities are endless. Next up: Anduril, another outfit which finds joy where Google finds management challenges.
Cynthia Murrell, December 20, 2019
Facial Recognition Glitches: Nothing New When Marketers and the Greedy Explains Technology
December 20, 2019
You can read “Federal Study Confirms Racial Bias of Many Facial Recognition Systems, Casts Doubt on Their Expanding Use” and get a semi coherent explanation about a nifty, much hyped technology.
A camera captures a picture. Software matches the image to a reference image. Software displays the identity of the person in the captured image.
Nothing could be easier, better, faster, and cheaper except when these systems return 25 to 60 percent incorrect matches. Close enough for horse shoes.
The write up states:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal laboratory known as NIST that develops standards for new technology, found “empirical evidence” that most of the facial-recognition algorithms exhibit “demographic differentials” that can worsen their accuracy based on a person’s age, gender or race. The study could fundamentally shake one of American law enforcement’s fastest-growing tools for identifying criminal suspects and witnesses, which privacy advocates have argued is ushering in a dangerous new wave of government surveillance tools.
I am not dragging my French bulldog into this pet store. I do want to point out a few things which are likely to make some people wish I would just go to the warehouse for the elderly and commence the dying thing:
1. None of the whiz bang technologies work in the real world. This means that enterprise search, content management, predictive analytics — don’t work like the marketing pitches say they do. The technologies work under quite specific conditions. When those conditions are not met, the systems go wonky. Clueless managers want to buy a silver bullet, preferably from someone with whom they can relate. When the tech nose dives into the ground, just call the lawyers and procure another system. There’s a reason liberal arts majors don’t take differential equations in college.
2. Engineering demonstrations take place in a hot house. You know. The kind of place that eccentrics use to raise orchids in Manhattan. Take the technology out of the hot house and let 23 year olds use the system, and the results are predictable. There are not enough dollars and people in the world to work through the data to figure out who is who and what is what. Why not guess? The results are likely to be more useful. Shocker. Come on. You know that random guesses can do better than a Bayesian based system which is not retrained on a continuing basis with carefully selected data.
3. Companies and stakeholders are so desperate for sales, opportunities to make presentations, and to convince people to give them money that the truth is squeezed from the engineers’ and developers’ actual statements. For example, the engineer says, “The training data must be updated every day, preferably in real time.” The marketer says, “Set it and forget it.” Yeah, right.
Net net: Facial recognition technology works under the right conditions. Unfortunately the right conditions are not the real world with people wearing sparkly sunglasses, a new hair style, a disguise, or a face that reflects one too many mojitos or a collision with a door.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2019
NSO Group: Getting Mostly Fact Free Content Marketing
December 19, 2019
NSO Group is a specialized software and services firm. For years, the company operated off the radar of journalists and other observers. Once again NSO Group is making headlines, and DarkCyber is not sure if this is a good or not so good thing.
“Israeli Spyware Allegedly Used to Target Pakistani Officials’ Phones” reports that “NSO Group malware may have been used to access WhatsApp messages for state on state espionage.” There’s nothing quite like the weasel word “allegedly” and the phrase “may have been used” to raise some questions about this write up in a UK newspaper.
The article focuses on WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. The controversial outfit provides encrypted messaging to millions of people. Facebook is not exactly the world’s most straightforward company because it fancy dances around a number of behaviors.
Is it surprising that specialized firms have developed systems and methods to shine some light on the encrypted messages flowing through a widely used messaging app? DarkCyber thinks that dozens of specialized firms are working on exactly this problem. Do bad actors use Facebook’s and other firms’ encrypted messaging solutions to plan, recruit, and raise money? Yep.
What are governments supposed to do? Ignore the bad actors’ and their low cost, secret communications mechanism?
DarkCyber thinks this is a reasonable question to consider. The write up states, reports, or asserts:
Representatives for NSO declined to comment on questions about whether the company’s software had been used for government espionage.
The company has previously said that it considered it a “misuse” of its product if the software was used for anything other than the prevention of “serious crime and terrorism”. While it is not clear who wanted to target Pakistani government officials, the details are likely to fuel speculation that India could have been using NSO technology for domestic and international surveillance. The government of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, is facing questions from human rights activists about whether it has bought NSO technology after it emerged that 121 WhatsApp users in India were allegedly targeted earlier this year.
Yep, “not clear”, “speculation”, and another “allegedly.” Plus, NSO Group and others cited in the write up declined to comment.
Reason? The information presented is designed to generate clicks and not provide substantive, verifiable facts about what are ultimately decisions by governments of nation states.
Right? Governments. Nation states. Laws. Policies. Maybe nations should not be allowed to operate according to their precepts.
And NSO Group? Back in the spotlight about systems and methods tailored to governmental entities. Perhaps the newspaper should focus on some of the more interesting specialist firms operating in the UK. There are some, and a few might welcome fact based coverage.
Alleged and speculative writing is marketing from DarkCyber’s point of view. NSO Group has customers; the newspaper begs for money. Relevant? Yes, because sensationalism is not helpful for some important specialist products and services.
Stephen E Arnold, December 19, 2019
The Middle Kingdom and Surveillance Technology: Another Revenue and Influencer Opportunity?
December 19, 2019
China empowers 63 ruling entities with surveillance tech.
We are not surprised to learn that China had become a hub of surveillance technologies for repressive governments. The Japan Times’ article, “AI Surveillance Proliferating, with China Exporting Tech to Over 60 Countries, Report Says,” cites a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article specifies:
“Chinese companies have exported artificial intelligence surveillance technology to more than 60 countries including Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others with dismal human rights records, according to a report by a U.S. think tank. With the technology involving facial recognition systems that the Communist Party uses to crack down on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region, the report calls Beijing a global driver of ‘authoritarian tech.’ The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released the report amid concerns that authoritarian regimes would use the technology to boost their power and data could be sent back to China.”
We also learn China often encourages governments to purchase this tech through soft loans, effectively subsidizing high-tech repression throughout the world. To make matters more ominous, over half these countries have opted in to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure project meant to boost China’s global economic influence.
The report does not stop at China, however. It notes that in Japan the NEC Corporation alone exports AI surveillance tech to 14 countries, IBM does so to 11 countries, and France, Germany, and Israel also proliferate it beyond their borders. According to the report, none of these nations adequately monitor and control the technologies, allowing it to be linked to a “range of violations.”
Cynthia Murrell, December 19, 2019
As the New Year Approach, a Small Reminder for the US Quantum Wizards
December 19, 2019
When it comes to supercomputers, IBM’s Watson is the number one machine. Despite environmental and human rights issues, China wants to be a world leader in quantum research and artificial intelligence. Tech In Asia shares how, “China Quantum Research Team Uses AI To Crack Processing Time In Supercomputer Race.” AI is apparently the key to making supercomputers billions of times faster than they currently are.
China has some of the world’s largest quantum research facilities and they have developed machine learning processes that have cut down on calculation times. The Chinese supercomputers would calculate the ties between subatomic particles. Quantum technology was designed to understand how quantum mechanics work, thus the need for the supercomputers. With the new AI, discovering correlations between subatomic particles faster than anything that has been invented to date. How would it work?
“ ‘It works like the separation of minerals,’ said professor Li Chuanfeng, a lead scientist of the study with the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, Anhui province. ‘The AI tells us whether an ore contains gold, iron, or copper, so we can make use of them for different purposes. This was not possible before,’ Li said.
Until now, quantum researchers have had to measure a complete set of physical properties to determine the type of link between particles. It is a difficult, time-consuming job and, when the number of particles increases, the workload grows exponentially. ‘At the end of the day, we might be able to tell this is not a piece of gold, and that would be it. There is no way to know more,’ Li said. This method will increase the supply of resources for quantum information processing significantly.”
USTC has experimented with quantum mechanics for years and the university has a large amount of data for the AI to learn from. The AI designed to measure particles’ physical properties is 90% accurate and works in less than a second, when before it required over an hour. USTC plans to train the AI with larger data sets and is working on a quantum computer than is predicted to be one trillion times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputer.
Sounds impressive, but not as interesting as the number of engineers the Middle Kingdom possesses.
Whitney Grace, December 19, 2019
Google: We Can Be Avis, National Car Rental or an Off Airport Outfit Too
December 18, 2019
Quite a goal. Google wants to beat Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud. Err, isn’t Google a cloud centric outfit, or at least since it morphed from the cutesy Backrub into the behemoth it is today? What if Google doesn’t think it is a cloud business? Hmm.
The answer, of course, is Googley. Google has waffled a bit. The phones, the home helpers, and the mouse pads. But the company operates “out there”, from data centers in regular buildings to wonky containers which can be towed to a location where power is cheap and skills are hard to come by.
A series of stories is zipping around about Google’s new desire to become the big dog in cloud computing. Just like the PR program featuring Jeff Dean, the Google is starting to realize that it may have more in common with the low rent business of scalping tickets than with high technology outfits changing the way business does business.
That’s an interesting thought because it runs counter to the received wisdom that Google is the font of technology. Like the fountains in Rome, lots of work is needed to keep the fountains spouting water. Tourists don’t see Rome’s plumbing, and for good reasons.
The goal of knocking off Amazon and / or Microsoft (love that lawyer conjunction, don’t you?) will be achieved by 2023. That works out to 24 months. Microsoft’s NT project turned into a death march, and I think this goal is likely to follow the same trajectory.
First, Amazon and Microsoft are not standing still. Good old Microsoft is working overtime to make Azure stable and semi-coherent. How many search engines does one desktop software company need? How many analytics solutions? How many servers? These are questions Microsoft engineers are rushing to answer. The airplane is aloft, and making adjustments to an engine when the plane in in flight can be difficult when it has to operate in a hybrid mode and the ground stations can be crashed by a software update. Cool?
Plus, Amazon is moving along a different trajectory. The company is engaged in a multi front war, and it is less and less a cloud company. That bookstore in Nashville and the undoing of FedEx make clear that not even a mid tier state like Tennessee is exempt from the Bezos bulldozer.
Second, Google has not been particularly adept at sticking with projects over time. Examples range from the social media attempts, to the Alon Halevy semantic tools, and to some as simple as messaging services. The culture of incompleteness is a hurdle. Managers can fiddle with incentives and tweak the hiring processes. But the company is a bit like a flotilla of sailboats generally heading toward port when a bad storm presents itself. Everyone knows where to go, but there may be some delays. Delays when trying to knock off Amazon and Microsoft may not be desirable.
Third, there are lots of other companies which want to be the Avis and National to the Uber business. Oracle, down but not out. IBM, a bit of a clueless geriatric but still capable of surprises like its sales success in India, and dozens upon dozens of other companies.
Net net: The write up “Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud” is useful, but it contains one telling statement:
Google shifted headcount growth to its cloud platform sales and engineering teams.
What’s going to be the Google equivalent of Windows 10 updates which don’t work, arrive late, and kill some data? If it is ad systems, Amazon is going to get the best location in the airport to serve rental car customers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2019
Business 101: Incentives Work at Facebook. Talk, Not So Much
December 18, 2019
Many years ago, I worked on a project for a very large, quite paranoid company. I am not sure how I landed a project to interview about two dozen unit CEOs and interview each about technology. As I recall, my task was to group the CEOs into three categories:
Bluebirds—These were the CEOs who understood technology germane to their business unit, evidenced no particular fear testing and integrating such technology, and who were following the company’s marching orders.
Canaries—These were executives who evidenced fear of technology. These individuals were not likely to move forward in order to reduce costs and staff using technology whilst increasing revenue and profits for the company.
Sparrows—These were hapless commodity CEOs who did not know much about technology, were happy snacking near careless MBAs lunching in the park, and who generally reacted to what most other CEOs were doing with regards to technology.
I had a bunch of fancy criteria, scoring sheets, prepared and consistent questions, plus other odds and ends required for such a subjective job.
My findings, I believe, revealed that the technology question was stupid. The CEOs were accountants and lawyers. Knowledge of technology was abysmal. The CEOs as a group responded to one thing—bonuses and raises. Chatter about technology was essentially irrelevant.
Whatever DNA this group of big time “leaders” had was warped in the intense radiation of benchmarks needed to take home a fat pay packet and get a bonus big enough to choke an investment banker.
I thought of this project when I read “Facebook Is Still Prioritizing Scale over Safety.” There’s quite a bit of yada yada in the write up, but this segment explains what drives Facebook:
Facebook calls its product managers’ ability to hit their metric “impact,” and impact can count for high percentages of product managers’ evaluations, though it varies by position and level. At the end of the evaluation process, each individual is assigned a rating by a manager — ranging from “doesn’t meet expectations” to “redefines expectations” — which is algorithmically tied to their compensation. Managers at Facebook aren’t given discretionary raise pools (raises are handed out evenly based on ratings) and there is no appeals process for evaluations, making a good rating paramount if you work at Facebook.
In order to be a bluebird, Facebook managers follow the incentive breadcrumbs. Why? Money. Public statements and other interesting Facebook behavior are irrelevant.
Why? The explanation may be found in the precepts of high school science club management methods. These are not taught in MBA school; these are learned in high school science club meetings and late night dorm sessions among programmers and assorted engineering wizards.
To fix Facebook, change the incentives.
Stephen E Arnold, December 18, 2019
An Artificial Intelligence Doubter: Remarkable
December 18, 2019
The often cynical and always irreverent Piekniewski’s blog has posted another perspective of the AI field in, “AI Update, Late 2019 – Wizards of Oz.” AI and deep learning scholar Filip Piekniewski has made a habit of issuing take-downs of AI propaganda, and this time he takes aim at self-driving cars, OpenAI, Microsoft’s DeepMind, and more. He writes:
“The whole field of AI resembles a giant collective of wizards of Oz. A lot of effort is put in to convincing gullible public that AI is magic, where in fact it is really just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The wizards use certain magical language, avoiding carefully to say anything that would indicate their stuff is not magic. I bet many of these wizards in their narcissistic psyche do indeed believe wholeheartedly they have magical powers….”
Be that as it may, the post is a good read for anyone who wants to see past the hubris. For example, we learn several self-driving AI companies have been having financial and/or technical difficulties while news stories around that tech sound less and less rosy. Also, the much-hyped OpenAI text algorithm was hacked, and turns out to be much less threatening (or impressive) than originally proclaimed. Then there’s the robot that has trouble with its Rubic’s cube project, the firing of Element AI’s CEO, and the disappointments of AI-based radiology. See the write-up for more. The post, however, concludes on a positive note:
“In practice, even though there is no magic, there is a lot of useful stuff one can do with that smoke and mirror not just deception and ripping off naive investors. I’m currently working on something that certainly uses what would be called AI, lots of visual perception and is in ways autonomous, but unlike some of these other moon shots seems quite doable (doable does not mean easy!) with today’s technology and moreover seems to provide a huge economical value. More on that soon, once Accel Robotics gets out of stealth mode and we publicly announce what we are up to. Stay tuned!”
Will people listen to a critic? Dial 1 800 YOU-WISH for an answer.
Cynthia Murrell, December 18, 2019
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