Author Archives: Hue White

Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi summarizes the current state of social media in the Arab world on PS21:

Although Al Qaeda has used social media to a limited degree over the past few years beyond posting their videos on YouTube, their breakaway group ISIS has taken its use another level. For starters, ISIS videos have been of a much higher production quality than Al Qaeda, using Hollywood-like special effects. In one of the videos posted online, the ISIS killer draws his knife to behead a hostage as the film cuts to slow motion to increase the dramatic effect. In a subsequent ISIS video of the beheading of 18 Syrian regime soldiers, the sound of beating heartbeats is added to the soundtrack. ISIS’ most gruesome upload to date featured the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot in a 21 minute video“that imitates the production values of documentaries aired on outlets like the History Channel”. The film ends by showing alleged homes of other Jordanian pilots identified through aerial mapping technology.

Since July 2014 ISIS has also been publishing an online magazine called Dabiq, now in its fifth issue, available to download in PDF and published in English. The propagandist publication, which without the gruesome content would look like a lifestyle magazine, features interviews with fighters and stories about recent conquests by the terrorist organization. The group has also used popular hashtags such as #WorldCup2014 to disseminate their videos and flood Twitter with their messages.

Conclusion:

What initially was a space for liberal minded technology geeks and activists is now a darker, gloomier world in which threats are made and videos of brutal beheadings and government flogging of liberal activists are shared and cheered. Today the social media landscape in the Middle East resembles the squares and streets of the Arab Spring cities of yore: it is a new battleground for hearts and minds between regimes, Islamists and activists; between young and old; between freedom and constraint.

There are signs of hope, though. In the midst of the all the doom and gloom, comedy from the likes of Bassem Youssef, Karl Sharro and Fahad Albutairi has become a tool to counter the growing online restrictions. Satire, “the weapon of the powerless against the powerful” has angered brainwashed ISIS followers and countered racist and Islamophobic coverage in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres. One thing is clear: the liberal minded activists of the Arab Spring may be down, but they are certainly not out.

The easy thought: any weapon can be turned against you.  But there’s a limited audience for brutality, and brutality begats brutality and little else.  For those who exist through its employment, they may enjoy limited success, but I do not imagine living in such a society brings one much pleasure.

The fight to retake Tikrit appears to be running into trouble.  From the New York Times:

By Day 2 of the American airstrike campaign against militants holed up in Tikrit, the mission appeared beleaguered on several fronts on Thursday: Thousands of Shiite militiamen boycotted the fight, others threatened to attack any Americans they found, and Iraqi officials said nine of their fighters had been accidentally killed in an airstrike.

In Washington, American military leaders insisted that things were going according to plan. They said that they were stepping into the Tikrit fight only after the Iranian- and militia-led advance on the city had stalled after three weeks, and that they welcomed working solely with Iraqi government forces.

Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of the United States Central Command, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that no Shiite militias remained in Tikrit.

While the withdrawal of Iranian-led Shiite militias was one of the preconditions for the Americans to join the fight against the Islamic State in Tikrit, the sudden departure of three of the major groups risked leaving the Iraqi ground forces short-handed, especially if other Shiite militiamen also abandoned the fight.

Al-Jazeera:

The Kataib Hizbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq militias both suspended their participation in Tikrit on Thursday , although the Badr Organisation, which is the largest and most powerful group within the Hashid Shaabi, said it would continue to fight.

The US-led coalition joined the fray in Tikrit at the request of Iraqi military commanders, but Shia militia commanders publicly rejected any US role in the campaign to retake the ISIL bastion.

“We were able to conclude the battle ourselves, but the US came in order to usurp this major victory,” Asaib Ahl al-Haq spokesman Naim al-Uboudi said.

Ghassan Charbel at The Arabist explains why the battle for to liberate Tikrit from ISIS forces is important:

It is not insignificant for ISIS to control Tikrit, a city with much resonance in recent Iraqi history — not because Saddam Hussein’s tomb is in the nearby village of Awja, but because it is symbolic of the Sunni Arab role in Iraq. The Iraqi government could not leave Tikrit in the hands of ISIS, but the conditions of the current surgery raise concerns that if Tikrit falls into the hands of its attackers – which is the necessary outcome – this could lead to the collapse of balance required for Iraq to remain united and part of the Arab world.

These concerns would not have been prompted if the Iraqi army was the one leading the charge to retake Tikrit and had adopted measures to quell the concerns of the inhabitants of Anbar, Saladin and Nineveh. But what is happening now is that “popular mobilization” is playing the main role in combating ISIS, and “mobilization” means an alliance of Shiite militias. The attack is also marked by an American refusal to provide air cover and an increasing tendency by Iran to openly admit that it is managing the campaign.

The Shia are roughly 65% of the Muslim populace of Iraq, the balance being Suuni.

To return to Iraq, this past January in Baghdad and Erbil I heard people expressing concern that Sunni Arabs will be the biggest loser in the war to eliminate ISIS. The war is being fought in their areas, with all that entails in terms of death, destruction and displacement. However, there was a belief that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was interested in convincing Sunni Arabs of the legitimacy of the fight before going to battle in their strongholds. There were also those who believed that the American role would moderate the Iranian conduct of this war. Because of fears that the spirit of revenge would break out, Ayatollah al-Sistani repeated calls to avoid vengeance and even to arm the Sunni tribes that were willing to take part in the war.

Iran is accused not just of meddling, but of having the ambition of being the most important country in the region.  Keep in mind that Syrians and Iraqis are considered Arabs, while the Iranians are Persians – two groups with a history of enmity.  Here’s a map, courtesy Google:

Nour Youssef covers an incoherent scene centering around ISIS.  Here are two examples, one centering on a sort of faux denial, the other injecting personality (and presumably a desire for notoriety) into the mix:

Hoping to stand out, the Lebanese Tony Khalifa decided to fake a beheading on air just to prove that it can be done. Personally, Khalifa believes that ISIS brutally kills people all the time, but he finds the most recent videos, especially James Foley and other Westerners’, to have been tampered with. Strengthening his doubts were the interviews with the families of the victims, who appeared too calm, “like their children were still alive.”

El-Mehwar TV, on the other hand, got itself a hacker with a soul patch, wearing a jacket over bare skin. He claimed to have hacked a jihadi forum (which they pretended was ISIS’s official website) and server, and to have watched the unedited version of the 21 beheadings, where the victims were screaming despite their mouths being mostly closed and that there was an un-ISIS-like woman on a crane and an American-looking film crew. “I can tell the nationality (of a person) from their appearance” he explained.

Not really too different from the conspiracy theories we see in the West, from Lunar Landing denial to the personalities often seen in the UFO / Roswell conspiracies.  People will see what aligns best with their ideologies, their psychological needs, and the occasional psychosis, especially when the incident is difficult to personally research and/or understand.

The St. Louis Fed supplies a chart of mortgage rates:

(h/t The Motley Fool)

In 1981 it was 18.5%.  I would expect mortgage rates to be related to demand, so I would (naively?) expect this to mean there is little demand for mortgages, or way too much money pursuing same.

Joan McCarter at the Daily Kos relishes Senatorial combat.

Betsy Hiel in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review:

The men worked in Sirte, midway between Benghazi and Tripoli on Libya’s coast and the birthplace of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed there by rebels in 2011.

They lived in 15-room compounds, each with a fenced and gated courtyard.

The ISIS gunmen easily scaled the fences, they said.

“There were two rooms for Christians,” recalled Hamdi Ashour, 29, a construction worker who shared Mahrouf’s quarters. “We pointed out one.”

He and the frightened workers said Christian men sleeping in the second room “were our cousins from our village and were Muslim,” Ashour said. “If they opened up that second door, we would have been killed, too,” because the gunmen would have easily discovered that the sleeping men were Copts.

“They opened up the first room and took seven Christians.”

“Of course, we were afraid,” said Mahrouf, explaining the horrible decision they made at gunpoint. “These people came at us with weapons loaded and banging on the door.”

Hostages dead, survivors saddled with guilt.  What drives men to commit such crimes?  Mundane problems such as lack of jobs?  Or is religious mania to blame?

(h/t The Arabist)

At The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost claims,

As I argued here, and in my new book, the Republican party has been aligned with big business for almost 150 years. In many respects, this is a good thing for conservatism. People who are employed by a business, after all, do not need the government to prosper. And big business employs a lot of people, so conservatives have common cause.

It’s a lovely delusion – but only that.  Without the government, you do not have national defense.  You might be able to have private police – but, speaking as an engineer, that system is naturally unstable.  You might have private fire fighting service, but that appears to be uncommon (I have not tracked that phenomenon since my days reading REASON Magazine).  You don’t have a national currency – arguing that Bitcoin makes government unnecessary merely highlights the fact that the technologies supporting Bitcoin – namely computers – were developed only with critical government support.

Small points?  Maybe he’s a bit sloppy?  Perhaps; yet all of the inaccuracies, the hidden biases, they all add up, until the entire paragraph, superficially comprehensible, becomes incoherent when read in depth.  Searching for some even minor truth, and I become overerwhelmed at how a collection of fallacies masquerade as some self-evident truth.  And at how his readership will swallow it without blinking.

In any case, President Calvin Coolidge said it sooner:

“the chief business of the American people is business.”

Earlier this month, NPR reported job creation numbers:

February’s report showed 295,000 jobs added, and a drop in the unemployment rate, down to 5.5. percent. It follows on the heels of January’s strong report, which showed strong wage gains.

Good news?  It turns out it’s so hard to know.  Here’s an absolutely charming graph from The American Prospect comparing job creation for various Presidents:

The X axis is in absolute numbers, which of course will never do, given population growth – so this graph is more or less useless.  They supply another utterly fascinating graph to remedy this fault:

But, as author Paul Waldman points out,

Of course, none of those presidents took office in the midst of an economic calamity of the kind we were suffering through when Obama began his term. If you want to be more generous to Obama, you could measure from the trough of the Great Recession, which in terms of jobs was February 2010. The economy has created over 10 million jobs since then, and if we continue the current trend, Obama could claim 16 million jobs between that point and the end of his term.

OK, so if we make an awkward analogy, comparing oranges to oranges doesn’t work if one orange is in a glass of water on Earth and another is in a glass of mercury on Jupiter.  It’s really a lot harder to accurately display data in graphical form than one would think, especially when that data is only partially numerical.  Each of these Presidents faced unique challenges and environments, and while a partisan might condemn Bush I for his poor performance in this group, a more independent observer might find factors belying such a conclusion.  As much as I enjoy a good graph, I think any such must be approached with the greatest suspicion, especially those originating from partisan sources.

Charles Joseph Minard was a 19th century pioneer of the field of information graphics.  He is the author of a famous graphic, representing Napoloeon’s March on Russia, which hangs on the walls of many nerds; I have it on my living room wall, in a place of honor.  It contains 6 categories of information which, with just a little study, correlates troop losses with geological location, chronological location, temperature, distance, and direction of travel.  It’s the sort of thing you stare at with your mouth hanging open the first time.  Every creator of a graph should aspire to such artistry. (A big h/t to Don Lee, a colleague who introduced me to this wonderful graphic perhaps 20 years ago.)

(with apologies to the NewScientist Feedback column for using Blue Whales as a measurement.)

Liquid Consciousness.

Let me know your guess.

CNN reports on O’Malley’s visit to Iowa.  I have to agree with the Iowans interviewed – even if Hillary is your favorite, strong opponents will be very important to sharpen her for what will no doubt be a bracing Presidential contest.  While O’Malley’s resume’ is certainly very respectable, it doesn’t really match hers, so he’ll have to bring on his list of accomplishments and how they apply at the Federal level, and then bring about the perception that he has experience in foreign policy.  I haven’t seen anything on that subject, yet.  Hillary should be able to use that for some good leverage unless he names a VP with some real chops.

Quentin Misiag at The Daily Iowan Ethics & Politics Initiative provides the view from Iowa:

O’Malley has slowly but surely chipped away at Rodham Clinton’s political gravitational pull, climbing from a inadequate public speaker to prime presidential product, should he announce a Democratic run.

Diane Bolte has watched O’Malley mature, even before the closing of the 2014 midterms, when she saw him at a fundraiser in Clinton.

“I’m ready for somebody different,” said Bolte, a 2nd District Democratic Central Committee Executive Board member, wincing when asked if somebody different meant an alternative to Rodham Clinton. “He’s somebody you can believe in.”

Certainly there will be a segment of the voters who would prefer neither another Clinton Administration nor a far right GOP Administration – they would provide a base from which to build a campaign which might capture a VP nomination – and possibly the Democratic nod should Hillary stumble or – to the surprise of everyone – choose not to run.  The Iowan piece ends with this:

Presidential historian and political pundit Tom Whalen, who specializes in the tenure and assassination of JFK, said the two have the same charisma, particularly in relation to domestic policies such as income equality.

O’Malley has worked to establish himself as a crisis manager while governor and mayor, as JFK did during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, Whalen said.

Whalen said O’Malley leads JFK’s early presidential career in at least one definitive area: speech delivery.

“JFK wasn’t really JFK until he gave that famous inaugural speech,” he said.

Now there’s an invocation of myth.

I wasn’t going to comment on Dr. Carson’s remark claiming President Obama is a psychopath.  Dr. Carson is not a psychologist, he’s a neurosurgeon.  He’s reportedly considering a Presidential run.  It’s gauche, it’s peurile, it’s red meat to the conservative base … and it’s really jumped the shark.

How much more will the conservative base eat up?  When does the porridge become too rich, and they start to walk away from the table?  Does Rush’s reportedly falling ratings serve as a good proxy for this possibility?  Do we next hear … no, I won’t give Rush the next level of insults to fling into the maw of the conservative base: one must watch what might appear in a search engine?

Someday adult conversation will return to the national stage.  Just Not Yet.

Write faster: Identifies the two largest Japanese warships of World War II, Musashi and Yamato, as aircraft carriers.

Bzzzzt.  The old World War II buff in me identifies them as battleships.  So does Paul Allen, since he just found one.

(Bet they fix that without notice.)

Subject of spam found in mail tonight:

Hue White Scalding your unread messages will be deleted in a few days aggrandize

From the NewScientist (28 February 2015) letters section comes correspondent Martyn Thomas:

Changes in human behaviour may make driverless cars unusable. Why would you wait to cross the road, or pull out at a junction, if you know that the approaching cars are programmed to give way?

I’m having visions of passionless driverless cars in massive traffic jams while people caper across the road at randomly selected intervals…. doom for an industry?

My current free time project is the implementation of an XML SAX-like parser (much like that offered by Apache), but written in (and for) Mythryl, a functional language heavily derived from SML/NJ; the goal of the folks working on Mythryl is to transform SML/NJ from an academic language mainly used for doing PhD work into a production level language usable by commercial entities.  I’m doing this for these reasons:

1. Mythryl doesn’t have such an XML parser;
2. I’m doing it using a recursive descent parser engine;
3. And I’m doing it using the EBNF definition of XML

The latter two reasons can be best illustrated from an example.  From the definition of XML comes this specification:

prolog ::= XMLDecl? Misc* (doctypedecl Misc*)?

The ‘?’ means optional, and the ‘*’ means the element may appear 0 or more times.  This is an ordered set of instructions, as in “first this and then this and then this ….” other statements can also include “or” statements.  The words themselves refer to other specifications; eventually, those specifications will actually mention characters in specific formats.

In Mythryl I can write, given sufficient preparation,

prolog = |xml_decl| & <misc> & |(doctypedecl & <misc> )| ;

Here, the |xyz| means xyz is optional, the <xyz> means xyz may apply 0 or more times, and the ‘a & b’ means ‘a and then b’, as discussed above – i.e, the ordering mechanism.   Given a little leeway for capitalization conventions and symbol changes, and the Mythryl code assumes an amazing resemblance to the EBNF – which means I can copy the EBNF from the document, make a couple of changes, and all of a sudden I have a parser to handle the syntax; a little more meddling and I have semantic support.  And the semantic can be added as I have time; the parsing works on any valid XML doc, and I can slowly add in the other details, such as detecting problems with well-formedness, etc.

I’m interested in just how close I can come to using the EBNF, how quickly I can go from copying to full-blown functionality, and the post-development maintenance aspects – if any, of course.  One of the interesting facets of using Mythryl is that about half the time, once you get it to compile something (and that can be a challenge, even for an experienced programmer, for someone new to Mythryl), it Just Works – a phrase that the developer of Mythryl has been using.  No further debug …

That hasn’t applied to the parsing engine, as shoving large amounts of data at it had a performance impact; I may have gotten around that with an optimization; generally, though, functional programmers are encouraged to design a good solution without worrying about performance – let the compiler do it.  One estimate of its garbage collection is that it’s 10 times faster than Java.

As a quick PS, this the recursive descent parser isn’t built into Mythryl; it’s a part of a small library I developed using a Mythryl tutorial as a starting point.  Operator overloads and currying are very interesting after decades of programming in C and some OO languages.

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate, and while I have not sat down and studied the content of G-S and compared it to the collapse, others have.  Those who think there’s causation include James Rickards at US News & World Report:

The oldest propaganda technique is to repeat a lie emphatically and often until it is taken for the truth. Something like this is going on now with regard to banks and the financial crisis. The big bank boosters and analysts who should know better are repeating the falsehood that repeal of Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with the Panic of 2008.

In fact, the financial crisis might not have happened at all but for the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking for seven decades. If there is any hope of avoiding another meltdown, it’s critical to understand why Glass-Steagall repeal helped to cause the crisis. Without a return to something like Glass-Steagall, another greater catastrophe is just a matter of time.

In 1929, the music stopped, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. It took eight years from the start of the boom to the bust. Subsequent investigations revealed the extent of the fraud that preceded the crash. In 1933, Congress passed Glass-Steagall in response to the abuses. Banks would be allowed to take deposits and make loans. Brokers would be allowed to underwrite and sell securities. But no firm could do both due to conflicts of interest and risks to insured deposits. From 1933 to 1999, there were very few large bank failures and no financial panics comparable to the Panic of 2008. The law worked exactly as intended.

In 1999, Democrats led by President Bill Clinton and Republicans led by Sen. Phil Gramm joined forces to repeal Glass-Steagall at the behest of the big banks. What happened over the next eight years was an almost exact replay of the Roaring Twenties. Once again, banks originated fraudulent loans and once again they sold them to their customers in the form of securities. The bubble peaked in 2007 and collapsed in 2008. The hard-earned knowledge of 1933 had been lost in the arrogance of 1999.

Cyrus Sanati at the New York Times reports on the same theme:

But 10 years later, the end of Glass-Steagall has been blamed by some for many of the problems that led to last fall’s financial crisis. While the majority of problems that occurred centered mostly on the pure-play investment banks like Lehman Brothers, the huge banks born out of the revocation of Glass-Steagall, especially Citigroup, and the insurance companies that were allowed to deal in securities, like the American International Group, would not have run into trouble had the law still been in place.

“Commercial banks played a crucial role as buyers and sellers of mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps and other explosive financial derivatives,” Demos, a nonpartisan public policy and research organization, wrote in a report discussing the problems it said were caused by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

“Without the watering down and ultimate repeal of Glass-Steagall, the banks would have been barred from most of these activities,” Demos said. “The market and appetite for derivatives would then have been far smaller, and Washington might not have felt a need to rescue the institutional victims.”

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins at Forbes disagrees:

By far, the single most cited example of this financial “deregulation” is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), which partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act thirteen years ago today. Regulatory evangelists including Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and recent senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street protesters, have named the overthrow of Glass-Steagall as public enemy number one.

Stiglitz, for instance, in a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair, could only muster two examples of the deregulation he thinks bears primary responsibility for the crisis: the repeal of Glass-Steagall and theSEC’s 2004 decision to raise banks’ debt-to-capital ratio from 12:1 to 30:1. The latter, of course was not deregulation, but re-regulation. For the regulatory evangelists, the repeal of Glass-Steagall is all they’ve got—and what they’ve got ain’t much.

Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933 to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks: commercial banks could not underwrite or deal in securities, and investment banks could not accept deposits. The Act also restricted commercial banks from being affiliated with any company that underwrote or dealt in securities.

But by the 1990s, the affiliation provision was widely viewed as unnecessary and even harmful to financial institutions. In 1999, President Clinton signed GLB into law. Although it left the bulk of Glass-Steagall in place, it ended the affiliation restrictions, freeing up holding companies to own both commercial and investment banks.

…

GLB [the act repealing Glass-Steagall] didn’t cause the financial crisis—and, when push comes to shove, the regulatory evangelists must admit as much. Stiglitz, in the same Vanity Fair article, concedes that Glass-Steagall did nothing to “directly” cause the crisis. Warren, meanwhile, confessed to New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin that Glass-Steagall would probably not have stopped the financial crisis, but that she was pushing to reinstate it because, in Sorkin’s words, “it is an easy issue for the public to understand and ‘you can build public attention behind.’”

Meanwhile, Senator Byron Dorgan (D – ND) tries on the hat of Delphi (from the NYT article):

One of the leading voices of dissent was Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. He warned that reversing Glass-Steagall and implementing the Republican-backed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was a mistake whose repercussions would be felt in the future.

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930s is true in 2010,” Mr. Dorgan said 10 years ago. “We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

Mr. Dorgan still feels the same way. “I thought reversing Glass-Steagall would set us up for dramatic failure and that is exactly what has happened,” the senator told DealBook on Thursday. “To fuse together the investment banking function with the F.D.I.C. banking function has proven to be a profound mistake.”

Senator Richard Shelby from the other side of the aisle also voted against repeal and so gets a feather in his cap as well.

Matthew Yglesias gives some initial coverage to O’Malley’s possible run here by way of covering Elizabeth Warren’s avowed non-run:

His agenda:

• Reinstate Glass-Steagall and break up the largest and most diverse banks.

• Prevent banks for taking tax writeoffs when they pay fines.

• Insist on CEO resignations as part of the resolution of regulatory misconduct claims and seek to prosecute individual executives for misconduct.

• An equivalent of the three strikes and you’re out policy to “revoke a bank’s right to operate if they repeatedly break the law.”

I have long felt that the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the near collapse of the financial system 8 years later, were an interesting correlate; certainly the prohibitions of Glass-Steagall on commercial banks owning securities firms makes sense, since conflicts of interest can occur.  So I find this attractive.

Ballotpedia covers O’Malley here.  They report that a VoteMatch analysis evaluates him to be a Moderate Liberal Populist:

Follow the above link to see his responses to the quiz.  I’m appalled that he wishes to expand the Military and opposes legalization of marijuana; in fact, I would like to see the military budget reduced substantially and marijuana legalized – the nation would greatly improve, depending on the metrics used.  Otherwise, his views are not unreasonable, although I suspect an omniscient creature would find the gun ownership issue will be unresolvable (not because the two sides are stubborn, either).

This is simply one of the most beautiful bits of writing I’ve seen on the web.  H/T Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, now inactive.  It is a stream of consciousness piece by a Nepalese woman before, during, and after an avalanche swept away a number of Sherpas.

Jonathan Keane covers it in NewScientist:

The Breathe Project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worked with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Breathe Cam – four high-resolution cameras that capture haze and air pollution activity, along with software that visualises the data online. Up and running since December across Pittsburgh, the idea is that residents equipped with accurate information can lobby more effectively for companies and councils to stick to environmental guidelines.

Wonkblog on the Washington Post covers the future with robots from the distinctly human perspective:

According to a widely-cited study by economist Carl Benedikt Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at high risk of disappearance due to improving technology. …

Techno-optimist Kevin Kelly of Wired [former editor of Whole Earth Review] celebrates the coming of our robot overlords, arguing that they will free us to do more fulfilling and higher-value jobs in the future. …

Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute finds that the skill-based technological change explanation for wage stagnation and high unemployment doesn’t track with trends like the declining wage premium for college, and so can’t be a driving force behind income inequality. …

In a Pew survey of 1,896 technology experts, about half believed that technology would destroy more jobs than it creates, creating mass unemployment, and half disagreed.

Not exactly definitive.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post takes issue with the kudos rained down upon Lee Kuan Yew at his passing:

The democratic model used by the USA, South Korea, Japan, and many others emphasizes more participation, more decentralization, and if it’s less efficient than Yew’s at its peak, it is also self-correcting.  Today is may seem as if our democracy is broken due to the inability of one side or the other to accept reality, but at some point reality will trump ideology, and those promoting ideology will fall by the wayside and become historical curiosities; we’ll revamp or dump the conflicting ideas and then carry on, buoyed up by our democracy – not weighed down.

NewScientist (28 February 2015 ) publishes Hal Hodson’s “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” (print: “Nothing but the truth”):

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. “A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy,” says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

I must be paranoid, because all I can see here is potential for abuse: gaming the system, er, vault, so that your truth is its occupant; infiltration of Google’s employee base by folks who want to make sure the vault has the proper truth; “tweaks” by Google executives and low-level employees; database rot – .01% error rate in the database still implies millions of fallacious “facts”.

Not to mention the lawsuits.  Oh, the lawsuits!  I’ll have to check with a lawyer or two of my acquaintance and get their thoughts on the matter.  And then government interference, both here and overseas, as certain uncomfortable facts make their way into the vault.

If you’re an older programmer, like moi’, then perhaps you haven’t had the training to appreciate Big Data.  If you want to learn in a competitive environment, then it’s time to hop on over to Kaggle, a web site which poses problems thought vulnerable to Big Data techniques, supplied by organizations ranging from obscure academic groups studying oddball problems (such as determining, given unlabeled data, whether any particular record is causative or merely correlative) to medical organizations (example: given pictures of eyeballs, identify which ones may have diabetic retinopathy) to commercial organizations trying to solve a number of different problems, ranging from optimizing flight planning to selecting the proper place to locate a new restaurant – all in an environment in which teams of programmers try to best each other while a deadline looms.

I indulged in this for 3-4 months before other obligations reduced my free time to zero; add in that I didn’t have the tools others had and had to write my own, in a language (Mythryl) still in development, and had to learn stats and probability on top of that … exhilerating exhilarating actually, and good for the brain, but way too time intensive.

But if you have time, want to learn something new, and get turned on by solving really advanced crossword puzzles, hey, Kaggle’s a fun place to start.

And today the GOP spews out more evidence of how the clutching hands of ideology have it by the neck … take it away, Steve Benen:

We’re well past the strange op-ed stage; McConnell yesterday “sent a detailed letter to every governor in the United States laying out a carefully researched legal argument as to why states should not comply with Mr. Obama’s regulations.”

The letter even cites Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, who believes the Obama administration’s regulations probably exceed the EPA’s legal authority.

But that doesn’t mean Tribe is on board with McConnell’s campaign. On the contrary, the law professor told The New Republic last month that states “can’t count on my being right.”