The Rundown December 14, 2019

• Philosopher for hire’s advice for bro-heavy coffee company to make its work environment less toxic: hire less bros.

• “Worked at Vice Then Went to Jail” - an interesting profile on millennial crime, and the growing sophistication of drug traffickers.

• YouTube as a vector for Nazism.

• Path dependency from the size of money to terminal dimensions - “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes”

• The toxic work environment at Away - and it’s all on Slack.

The Rundown December 9, 2019

• Swifties swarm a hedgefund to intervene in IP spat - “Ms. Swift’s note sent Swifties on a passionate mission to familiarize themselves with the Carlyle portfolio.”

• Sharenthood, by Leah Plunkett from MIT Press:

Unwittingly, parents, teachers, and other trusted adults are compiling digital dossiers for children that could be available to everyone—friends, employers, law enforcement—forever. In this incisive book, Leah Plunkett examines the implications of “sharenthood”—adults' excessive digital sharing of children's data. She outlines the mistakes adults make with kids' private information, the risks that result, and the legal system that enables “sharenting.”

• Jason Blum, writer of “The Big Short”, is now tackling the WeWork drama.

• Starting an open access journal - I had the sense that something was broken with how we were publishing scholarly articles, so I’m trying to get an open access, peer reviewed online legal journal going in the UP Law Center.

• “Karma”, a scuplture by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.

Notes for Big Data Class December 1, 2019

This will be both a paper for the Law Center and a module of my Big Data class. The plan is to take in a bunch of Word documents(Supreme Court decisions) as input, and then subject them to a series of automated textual analyses: classification, clustering, and sentiment analysis. Possibly a couple of visualizations as well.

I'm going to try this out with KNIME, which is turning out to be an easy to use (translation:non-STEM undergraduate friendly, no coding) data analytics platform. So far, I was abIe was able to bang out a workflow to ingest text files and turn it into a data structure. Next step is to map it to another data structure that maps words with sentiments.

I wonder what will happen if I feed Republic v. Sereno into a neural network, and then plug that into a chatbot. Will it be a rambling misogynist? Or the very model of reason?

The Rundown November 25, 2019

• “A Novel Cross-Disciplinary Investment Strategy“ from Bullk & Moon:”Bull & Moon provides high level analysis of the general favorability of investments into publicly traded stocks based on the calculated astrological compatibility between the individual investor and the corporate entity invested in.”

• Investing in Bitcoin: The Asset Allocator’s Perspective - “For a typical asset allocator — an institution trying to own a basket of assets with favorable risk-adjusted returns — the right cryptocurrency allocation is close to zero, but nonzero.”

• Online dating increases inter-age competition, making the dating “market” more efficient.

• Bitcoin's fatal flaw - “limited adoption constitutes an endogenous characteristic of not only Bitcoin but also Proof-of-Work (PoW) payments blockchains more generally“

• A book review of all therapy books - “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?”

The Rundown November 16, 2019

• How Elizabeth Warren Is Reviving the Concession Theory of the Corporation - “[C]orporations are granted special privileges such as perpetual legal personality (and associated rights such as the right to sue and to be sued, have property rights separate from its shareholders etc.) and limited liability by the state, and they should thus serve a public purpose in exchange.”

• The men who still like Fight Club - “It’s kind of, like, Yeah, if his favorite author is Bret Easton Ellis, his favorite movie is ‘Fight Club,’ and he wants to talk about Bitcoin or Jordan Peterson—these are all warning signs.”

• China has a bubble of glass-bottomed bridges.

• An oral history of Limewire.

• Cryptogeeks discuss - Is blockchain dead?

Notes for Big Data Class, November 11, 2019

I’m going to start posting notes of the papers and books I am writing, as well as the lessons I’m planning. At the very least, I can have a low-stakes way of mapping out the idea, documenting it for any claim of priority. Maybe it will even get some feedback, who knows.  

Right now I’m designing the toolchain for the Big Data course I’m teaching next year. Just installed Jupyter, which allows me to intersperse notes with running code and visualizations. It will be the default way to demonstrate and document each lesson (and the way students can turn in exercises). Kaggle also looks interesting. It has some data sets, and can host Jupyter notebooks.The next problem is what language/execution environment to use and embed to the notebooks - R? Python? Octave? Right now I am partial towards Ovtave. And then there’s Anaconda, which offers a way to have all these tools in one convenient package, with environments and dependencies automatically managed. 

The Rundown November 4, 2019

• Empathy on the margins - “Any problem you can express in capital, you can probably express in software nowadays”;

• Aggregation theory - “This has fundamentally changed the plane of competition: no longer do distributors compete based upon exclusive supplier relationships, with consumers/users an afterthought. Instead, suppliers can be commoditized leaving consumers/users as a first order priority.” (See also Defining aggregators);

• NoCode - A gallery of tools, examples, and other resources for building apps without coding;

• Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music - finally, I can know the difference between Techno and House;

• I don’t know why a trailer for a video game would tear me up, but it does:

The Rundown November 2, 2019

• Brain-reading wearable tech from Facebook will require implants - Because this is exactly what the world needs right now. Facebook in the brain;

• These photographs of mathematicians’ blackboards are so beautiful;

• Good use of footage, computerized models, and a forensic approach to architecture to help solve a crime.

• Sesame Street tackles the opioid crisis. The Batibot version will be so much more hearbreaking - Where is my father, Manang Bola? What is tokhang?

• REBUS and the anarchic brain - “psychedelics…decrease the influence of top-down prediction-making and increase the influence of bottom-up sense data.”

Back from Warsaw

I’m not sure if it was the weather (gray skies, raining half the time), the architecture (a lot of Soviet-style apartment complexes and government buildings), or the history of the place - but man, Warsaw was bleak. But deeds needed getting done, so I went there to present a paper I co-authored with Dr. Umali, about “Torre de Manila and the politics of heritage conservation”, before a linguistic conference. The language of the law and the language of space in constructing social realities. We need to do a better job of recognizing these understructures.

The Rundown September 27, 2019

• Fourth Amendment crop top - “The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations”;

• The Dere Types wiki;

• A more intuitive restatement of the Monty Hall Problem;

• Sony Walkman 40th Anniversary Exhibit - I remember having a couple of these. - a hand-me-down of the blue original and a black one with recording capabilities;

• An introduction to Fourier transforms.