We’ve been clearing a backlog of some episodes of Nerds on Draft but also our backlog of the excellent T.V. that’s continually rolling out on the internet. In the latest episode of our podcast, we gush about the non-traditional show Horace and Pete. It’s simply a work of art.
We also drink G-Bot provided by one of our wonderful listeners. Cheers.
David Batty at The Guardian has an interesting piece about using social media to bust rich deadbeats:
Hall, a former lawyer turned corporate investigator, said most investigations were more complex, and involved using social media to map a target’s family and business networks. For example, they might use the metadata embedded in an Instagram post to identify their location, or use a Facebook “like” or tag to track down a proxy company.
Facebook is now using location to suggest potential “Friends” which just sounds like a terrible idea:
Last week, I met a man who suspected Facebook had tracked his location to figure out who he was meeting with. He was a dad who had recently attended a gathering for suicidal teens. The next morning, he told me, he opened Facebook to find that one of the anonymous parents at the gathering popped up as a “person you may know.
The Backblaze alternative to Amazon S3 is out of beta with new support for Synology Cloud Sync. I’ll be sticking with my Amazon Cloud syncing because it works for me and is cheaper. But I have to say the Backblaze B2 option is pretty compelling. By my calculations it would only cost about $35 per month to store 7TB of data.
From Eater
Unfortunately, in some industries, these thefts are not one-off occurrences. For the past five years, the agriculture community in California’s Central Valley has struggled with continuous nut heists plaguing the industry. According to CargoNet, a network of cargo shipping firms and law enforcement with a common goal of preventing losses, over the past four years, $7.6 million dollars worth of nuts have been stolen. In 2015 alone, 31 reported cases of nut thievery resulted in a total loss of $4.
A good deal on a bunch of excellent software. I recommend DEVONthink Pro Office, TaskPaper and Scrivener if you don’t already have them. An excellent collection of research and writing tools.
From the amazing Cryptography Engineering summary:
A much more promising approach is not to collect the raw data at all. This approach was recently pioneered by Google to collect usage statistics in their Chrome browser. The system, called RAPPOR, is based on an implementation of the 50-year old randomized response technique. Randomized response works as follows:
When a user wants to report a piece of potentially embarrassing information (made up example: “Do you use Bing?
Interesting options for ScanSnap owners: Scan to cloud services without a computer. The new ScanSnap Cloud is available on the MAS and configures the ScanSnap ix500 and ix100 to scan directly to services like Dropbox and Evernote without a computer.
I think I’ll stick with my ScanSnap to DEVONthink workflow for now but I’m definitely interested to see where they take this. My ScanSnap is still one of my favorite pieces of hardware.
One of my internet-friends created something very nice. Dr. Bunsen is a data wrangler in the real world and he put his skills together to create a beer recommendation service called BeerAI. You can read about the project on his website
To make beer recommendations, BeerAI uses several low rank approximation techniques in conjunction with collaborative filtering and nearest neighbor methods. The latent factor models capture hidden features of the data that haven’t been explicitly modeled, thereby providing some of the novelty in the recommendations.
Derek Lowe has some choice comments about the Google biotech Verily.
Here’s the quote from their CEO:
. . .We’ve done a lot, to be quite humble about it. Enough to give us great confidence that this is all likely to work. . .
We know that much of this works: we’ve become very good at nanoparticle decorating, we’ve become very good at concentrating them and understanding how they behave in magnetic fields.
