Tag: ViaWaverly

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Principles of Healthy Social Media

I stumbled on this research by New Public, an organization that wants to reimagine the Internet as a public space. (Via Fast Company.) They asked power users of major Internet platforms questions like Does the platform encourage people to treat one another humanely?

Based on the answers, the researchers came up with 14 principles for healthy social media. Here are some of my favorites:

• Inviting everyone to participate
• Encouraging the humanization of others
• Building bridges between groups
• Promoting thoughtful conversation

Wave: 🕸️ Better Web

Secrets hidden in Pascal’s Triangle

You know Pascal’s triangle, right? If I asked you, apart from 1, which number is the most frequent in the triangle and how often it appears, what would you say?

If you’re like me, you’d probably guess something like: “I have no idea which number it is, but it probably appears infinitely many times.” Well, thanks to Terrence Tao and Waverly, I learned this week about the Singmaster’s conjecture which says that no number larget than 1 appears infinitely many times. In fact, the current record holder is 3003 and it appears 8 times.

I always love it when strange numbers like 3003 appear in a conjecture. Makes maths feel like a wonderful and unexplored world.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

Tectonic Plates on Venus

What’s one thing Earth has that no other planet has? Tectonic plates! At least that was what we thought until a couple of weeks ago where scientist found evidence that Venus surface moves around.

Wave: 🌋 Geological Mysteries

A Feel-Good Math Story

I immersed myself in this heartfelt tribute of a son to his mathematician father.

For me, the symbols are mathematical madeleines. They remind me of the pads of paper that were scattered around our house, each full of my father’s scribblings—his version of the sandpiper tracks that had delighted him as a child. When I was a child myself, I would watch him on the couch, deep in thought, scratching away with a mechanical pencil. At some point, I thought that I might like to have a life like that.

Dan Rockmore

There’s something about the struggle of intellectuals that moves my heart. I connect with their desire to do the greatest work, the slow realization that they might not get there, and their human condition rising from the depth of their soul and making them fall in love again with the mundane.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

Rally, A New Privacy-First Platform

Mozilla just introduced Rally, a novel data sharing platform that puts privacy above everything else.

Today, we’re announcing the Mozilla Rally platform. Built for the browser with privacy and transparency at its core, Rally puts users in control of their data and empowers them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society.

The goal seems to be to enable technology policy research by academics, which often do not have access to the data they need —this data being trapped in the walled gardens of online services. This objective reminds me quite a bit of data trusts, although the article doesn’t mention them.

Wave: ⚖️ Policies for people

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Fighting Algorithmic Fatigue

I’m still looking for the right term to capture that nauseous feeling that grasps me when I’ve spent too much time stuck in an algorithmic stream. Doomscrolling is my favorite one for now, but I’d like one that captures the emotion, not the action. I stumbled on algorithmic fatigue this week.

I can’t really find a way to communicate with this app or service to say that’s not what I want, or at least that is not everything I want.

Female, 30 (Shanghai, China)

This is a quote from a series of interviews in this research report by the University of Helsinki, Alice Labs and Reaktor. You might prefer reading this summary.

The whole report is full of interesting findings:

The meticulous, first-hand observations demonstrate that recommender systems and digital assistants repeatedly fail in their promise of providing pleasurable encounters, rather delivering irritating engagements with crude and clumsy machines. […]

Digital technologies are often developed to a ‘one size fits all’ model. Yet, as the experiences with recommender systems and digital assistants suggest, in different contexts, people take up very different stances in relation to technologies. They might want to be passive, or prefer to be actively involved.

Wave: ☕ Design Strategy

Are Bullshit Jobs Bullshit?

I’ve been a fan of David Graeber’s Bullshit Job hypothesis ever since I read the books a few years ago. In fact, I believe the reason we don’t see more jobs being displaced by automation is because we’re in some weird “job bubble” where bullshit jobs are being created through a very complex and opaque system of incentives.

Yet, when I created Waverly, one of my goal was to help me step out of my filter bubble, so when I saw that article pop up in my daily stack, I was not exactly happy (it’s not fun to have one’s beliefs challenged by a triggering title) but I still went ahead and read it:

Graebers made a number of claims that the researchers attempted to corroborate:

Between 20% and 50% of the workforce are working in bullshit jobs. No, only 4.8% of EU workers said they were doing meaningless work.

The number of bullshit jobs has been ‘increasing rapidly in recent years’. Nope. Actually, the percentage of bullshit jobs fell from 7.8% to 4.8% in 2015.

Graeber argued bullshit jobs clustered in certain occupations, like finance, law, administration, and marketing. The researchers found no evidence that those occupations had more people feeling like their work was meaningless.

OK, so my gut feeling — that the number of Bullshit Jobs is constantly increasing — doesn’t seem to be corroborated by these researcher’s finding.

Maybe I’m wrong? Maybe we need more research on this? Anyway, interesting data point.

Wave: 👍 Modern Leadership

Lessons from Existing and Failed Data Trusts

Interesting research from Cambridge’s Bennett Institute that contrasts failed data trusts with successful ones. Starting with a famous failure:

Sidewalk Labs’ proposal for the Urban Data Trust in Toronto, Canada was abandoned amid a heated public controversy. Legal scholars and privacy advocates argue the goal of the trust may have been to make the data collected in the city exempt from Canada’s privacy laws.

However, there seems to be some agreement that sharing data is needed to improve our common goals:

European policymakers argue it is important for individuals to accept their role as “data donors” who willingly share information with the trustworthy organisations for collective benefit.

And some examples where data trusts are working:

One example of a data trust that works for a civic purpose is the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust, which is operated by the University of California in partnership with several district school boards and local social services. The trust is a non-profit cooperative and shares the data only among the organisations that donate data.

Wave: 💡 Value Alignment

Learning about Slipstream

Thanks to this article, I’ve learned a new term for a literary genre: Slipstream. It seems to be very ill-defined, but from what I gather from the article, it’s a genre I’m quite likely to enjoy:

Sterling then goes on to name “slipstream” for a group of books that straddle the fence of mainstream and genre, even acknowledging the term as a parody of the word “mainstream.”

Sterling admitted it’s not clearcut what slipstream is. Most of the essay brainstorms and then acknowledges arguments against the term. In a nutshell he wrote, “this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange.”

Slipstream novels are categorized as not strictly under science fiction, fantasy, or horror, but may be recommended by their ardent readers. On the other hand, a mainstream reader may also recommend a slipstream novel. Although they may add it might be a bit on the weirder side.

Wave: 📗 Litterature Lover

Faster Synthetic Data

I started my research career in Computer Graphics, which is all about (approximate) physics simulations. Now that I’m more into Machine Learning, I often find myself to be one the biggest proponent of synthetic training data: going back to first principles to synthesize something that looks like the real thing, and try to train an ML system on this.

This project goes further and proposes to use ML to speed-up the generation of synthetic data… to train future ML system!

This may sound ridiculous. If you already succeeded in training a system to generate your synthetic data, why use it to train a new system?

But it might be brilliant… If you have a fast ML-based data synthesizer, you might be able to use it as a component within a more complex synthesizer, ultimately allowing you to train better downstream AI models.

Wave: 🧠 Generalized Machine Intelligence

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Cooking for Steve Jobs

This week featured article is an excellent interview of MIT professor Sherry Turkle.

She talks about her quest to find her father — and her discovery that he had been experimenting on her as a child, ouch! She talks about how she once cooked a vegetarian dinner for Steve Jobs that he rejected because it was not his kind of vegetarian. Most importantly, though, she talks about how she pioneered the study of the social impacts of technology in days where engineers only saw computers as tools.

Here’s a child who says, when she programs a computer, ‘It’s like putting a little piece of my mind in the computer, and I come to see myself differently.’ And I would argue that programming this machine was changing her way of thinking about herself, giving her more feelings of control over her life. Now, no one said that I was wrong, but they would say that it was irrelevant. Nobody ever said my transcripts weren’t real or I hadn’t done the work. They said, “That’s not what the computer is about.”

Sherry Turkle

There’s a really interesting bit about her research on phones and how they act as empathy-draining devices:

If you’re at a table, and your phone is turned off and put face down on the table, and you’re in a conversation with another person, you will feel less of an empathic connection with that person. Even a phone turned off and face down—even one taken off the table, but still in your peripheral vision—undermines our capacity for empathy. The reason is that the presence of the phone reminds you of all the “elsewheres” you can be. A person in conversation just cannot compete with that.

Sherry Turkle

This really made me want to read the whole book.

Wave: 🥰 Empathy in AI (Contributed by Kristine Gloria)

Why your Consciousness Depends on the Low-Entropy Early Universe

That title grasped me. Consciousness? Entropy? Early Universe? Count me in!

The article by Jonathan Simon does a great job of introducing the second law of thermodynamics. I wish I had encountered earlier the thought experiment of a “time-reverse twin” earlier, it’s sticky.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

How to Poison the Data that Big Tech is Using to Surveil You

This article, by Karen Hao, came just before her famous piece on Facebook’s director of AI and I had missed it.

She cites research from Northwestern that explains how we could use our collective data as a bargaining chip. I’ve been researching that topic when I studied data trusts and I do believe federating our data is a great way to bring balance back. If I go dark on Google Map, the Mountain View giant wont shed a tear, but if all Montreal users go dark at once, they will lose their ability to forecast local traffic — amongst many other things.

In the absence of data trusts, though, what could we do? Here’s what the Northwestern students suggest:

Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it —leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.

Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.

Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.

Wave: 📖 Open Everything

Quantum Computing Explained… Well!

A lot of popular explanations of quantum computing consistently get a lot of details wrong. How often have I heard Quantum Computers are going to make everything exponentially faster! Ouch.

This 10 minutes explainer video, which I found via Scott Aaronson’s article about it, might just be the best short explanation of Quantum Computing I’ve seen.

Wave: ⚛️ A Quantum of Quantum

A Map of Perception Sensors

We talk a lot about AI, but when you look at the most important progress deep learning brought us it tends to be in a few fields: vision, speech processing, natural language understanding…

Our ability to do well hinges on being able to perceive things better. Tesla seems to believe cameras are all you need, but I happen to think that progress in the space of sensors is going to play a key role.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to find this map of companies powering vision-enabled platform.

Wave: ⚙️ Exploded View

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

A New Type of Puzzle

My puzzle wave continues to deliver, with Tapa, a delightful new type of cell-shading puzzle. The ingenuity of pencil & paper puzzle creators never ceases to amaze me.

Wave: ♟️ Puzzles

“Dear Trolls”: A form letter to tell trolls where to shove it

This article, written as a form letter, does a good job of highlighting the passion and hard work that goes into so-called traditional journalism. It’s also a non sarcastic approach to the problem of communicating with trolls.

Reporters are human beings. The best reporters have empathy and curiosity — and opinions. Often, they went through the process of developing those opinions as young people. We benefit from their opinions, and their passions. We value them.

When they join our organization, we make it very clear that they need to adhere to the highest professional standards in journalism. That doesn’t mean renouncing their opinions, or never having had any. It means not allowing their opinions to get in the way of fairly gathering, assessing and presenting facts.

Wave: ✍️ Stories about Leaders

Active Volcanoes on Mars?

I had missed that story, but my Geological Mysteries wave picked it up for me.

Strewn across Elysium Planitia near the equator of Mars, researchers recently found intriguing signs of far more recent volcanic activity. This broad plain, which lies just south of the volcanic province of Elysium, includes several major volcanoes.

Wave: 🕵️‍♂️ Geologic Mysteries

Experiments reveal 2:1 preference for women on STEM tenure track

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals the result of five hiring experiments for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology.

Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.

Wave: 👩‍🔬 Women of Science

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose 5 diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Why Economics is Failing Us

There will always be a tradeoff between innovation speed and robustness of results. If you innovate faster, your results will not be as robust. If you insist that results be robust, you will slow down the speed of innovation. As a society, we have to acknowledge this tradeoff, otherwise we risk flip-flopping from demanding more robustness (when an innovation goes wrong) to demanding more speed (when innovation slows down).

This piece, in Bloomberg, shows how this is playing out in the world of Economics:

In the 1980s, the ideal journal submission was widely thought to be 17 pages, maybe 30 pages for a top journal. The result was a lot of new ideas, albeit with a lower quality of execution. Nowadays it is more common for submissions to top economics journals to be 90 pages, with appendices, robustness checks, multiple methods, numerous co-authors and every possible criticism addressed along the way.

There is little doubt that the current method yields more reliable results. But at what cost? The economists who have changed the world, such as Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich Hayek, typically had brilliant ideas with highly imperfect execution. It is now harder for this kind of originality to gain traction. 

Tyler Cowen

I also find this little sentence quite deep. I do believe solo researchers or small teams have a higher potential of spearheading ideas that rock the boat:

Furthermore, more economic research these days is done in large teams, rather than solo, so the incentive is “go along to get along.”

Tyler Cowen

Wave: 💸 Passion Economy

VR Training to Fix Coporate Racism!?

In which I learned that the VR hammer is so desperate to find its nail that it’s willing to try absolutely anything.

Corporations don’t need to simulate more diverse workplaces, they need to make them happen​.​

No immersive VR experience can translate to a less-white corporate America. Nor can any virtual world replicate the present-day effects of 400 years of subjugation or the generational trauma of a people. At best, VR exercises momentarily produce visceral insights into the lives of others. It is not sensible to go through any bias training—VR or not, mandatory or not—and come out on the other side and say you know the lived experiences or struggles of this Black skin.

Rita Omokha

Wave: 👩‍🔬 Women of Science

Native American Vaccination Rates Skyrocket

This piece is more than two months old, but it was fascinating to read how Native American Tribes had led many of the most successful coronavirus vaccination campaigns in the U.S. The sad thing is that they seem to have succeeded in part because they’re so used to working with severely limited resources:

“We knew how to reach our population, despite these obstacles, because we’ve been having to overcome these obstacles for some time already,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, Seattle Indian Health Board’s chief research officer and member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. “That doesn’t mean you let it continue.”

Wave: 👾 Tech and First Nations

Beautiful Exponential Sums

This was a perfect find for the math geek in me! John D. Cook has an interactive webpage that plots today’s date on the Complex Plane, using a simple exponential sum. The results are these beautiful graphs that sometimes have nice repeated patterns and sometimes seem totally chaotic.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

Scientists Should be Kinder

Kindness is not a very popular word in the business world, but somedays I feel I’m on a quest to rehabilitate it. I firmly believe you can be kind and be a great business leader. Naomi Oreskes thinks that the same is true in science.

Too often we permit the alleged importance of our work to justify a neglect of basic human decency and compassion.

Being kind is viewed as secondary to being successful. […] If we want to nurture talent, particularly among those who have been historically underrepresented in science and may therefore feel uncertain as to their place in the endeavor, it behooves us to consistently treat students and co-workers with dignity and respect.

Naomi Oreskes

Wave: 🧪 Practical Scientific Ideas

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose 5 diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Ditching Meat, or Farming Better?

My household eating habits have changed quite a bit since my daughter became a pescatarian. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the impact of meat eating on climate change. Still, I’m interested in a nuanced debate on the question, that does the hard work of separating veganism-for-climate from veganism-to-reduce-animal-cruelty. Both topics are important, and are often promoted by the same people, but I find that refining my opinion on that question requires me to understand these nuances.

That’s why I was really happy to see this Washington Post article come up on my Waverly hightlights. In it, Kyle Jaster, a creative farmer in the Catskills, talks about inclusive alternative food supply chains that believe the best way to bring change is not to alienate people by proposing solutions they cant relate to. The way in which he describes his pig farm also really makes me want to visit that place:

I run a small, family-operated pig farm in Upstate New York. We believe in practicing agriculture in a way that regenerates the land: Our pigs live outdoors in the woods and eat a diverse diet of nuts, grasses and other forage, supplemented by non-genetically-modified grain grown on a nearby farm using regenerative practices, a system of farming involving reducing or eliminating tillage, cover-cropping fields to increase their fertility instead of spraying fertilizer, and integrating trees and animals into their management plans. […] We don’t raise more than our land can sustain, and we’re preserving habitat for myriad plants, animals and fungi to thrive. Our pigs represent a new life for the farm.

Kyle Jaster

Wave: 🤠 Farmer Phil (Contributed by Phil Telio)

Selling your Emotions

File that under the creepy world I’m decidedly fighting against. A company filed a patent for a system that looks at your face to reads your emotional response to a piece of marketing and then initiate a follow-up action based on that reaction. They say that, to comply with GDPR, creators using the technology will need to obtain consent before reading someone’s face. Hurray for strong privacy laws!

Wave: ⚖️ Policies for People

Remote Work: the Next Fracture Line?

Building a startup during the pandemic means we have never developed a habit around going to the office. How will we work once this is all over? How can we build a work environment that fosters everybody’s best work?

Increasingly I’m finding there’s one variable that seems to correlate with one’s affinity with remote work: age. Young people seem to want to go back to the office while older professionals are perfectly happy in their nice and comfy home office. Some recent surveys seems to show the same thing.

Wave: ✈️ Working Remotely

A Framework for Robots

Artificial Intelligence is quite an abstract concept and to this day people often ask me what does AI actually look like? Robots, on the other hands, are much more obvious! Except they’re not. When you start thinking about them seriously, you quickly realize that they are quite hard to define. Is an autonomous car a robot? Yes? Well then, is a remote-controlled car a robot? What about these gigantic robotic arms that repeatedly perform the same motion in a car factory?

That’s why I was quite happy to see this simple and well explained framework by Sebastian Castro, a software engineer at MIT.

Wave: 🤖 Robots that Work

Being WOQE

One of my goals, with Waverly, is to build a system that makes it easy for people to intentionally open up to diverse opinions that rarely pierce their filter bubbles. My dream is that you could simply write a wave that says: Bring me marginalized voices on topic X and for Waverly to start peppering your stream with such content.

That’s why I was so excited when I saw this article by Regine Gilbert, a black professor teaching user experience design and assistive technology at NYU. In it, she recounts how her first trip to Europe opened her eyes on the fact that there are new things to experience each and every day.

When she came back, she consciously decided to make each day different and she embedded these learnings in here WOQE philosophy: watching, observing, questioning, and exploring.

Wave: 👾 Tech and First Nations (Contributed by Mehdi Benboubakeur)

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose 5 diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

Flourishing Out of the Pandemic

This piece just made me feel good about the perspective of celebrating and being mindful of the little things once we get out of the pandemic.

Savoring is about appreciating an event or activity in the moment, sharing tiny victories and noticing the good things around you.

A 2012 study of college students found that taking part in a savoring activity called “mindful photography” resulted in overall improvements in mood and a significantly greater sense of appreciation for college life. The students were instructed to take at least five photos of their everyday lives — friends, their favorite view on campus, books they enjoyed — twice a week for two weeks. Reflecting on the photos, and the small moments that brought them joy, helped the students focus on the good in their lives.

Right after reading this I wrote three new waves: The Good Deeds, Growth Mindset and Socially Acceptable Mental Illness… They are all returning pretty good content already.

Wave: 🤗 Happiness at Work (Contributed by Seb Paquet)

Less Antibiotics in Our Meat

A short piece through which I learned about the Farm to Fork Strategy from the European Commission, which sets an ambitious target to reduce the sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals by 50% by 2030. (There’s a video recording of the conference, but I did not watch it.)

Wave: 🦠 AI against Antimicrobial Resistance (Contributed by Yoshua Bengio)

Restoring Mangas

This one scratches a couple of my itches: my old love for computer graphics, my dilettante interest in mangas, and a real Python implementation of an ML algorithm!

Wave: ⚙️ Exploded View

Why We Still Love Newspapers

I’m spending a lot of time these days thinking about what makes a great discovery environment. I was happy to see this piece in my Waverly this week:

“Many people still love print newspapers, and to an extent, we also see that they like the digital replicas of print newspapers as much as they do the physical version,” said Damon Kiesow, a professor of journalism professions and co-author on the study.

“We feel newspapers are fulfilling some sort of need in a person’s daily life that is not currently being effectively fulfilled with the digital experience. The contextual clues that help tell readers what stories are important, why they should care about what stories they are reading and where to locate the news that is most important to them, are being weakened by structures missing in digital news.”

Wave: 📊 Understanding Information

Maze or Sudoku?

Why not both! My puzzle find of the week is this brilliant variation on an old classic. In Path Sudoku you place maze tiles on a grid to connect the exit nodes. The twist? You must follow the rules of the classic game: the same time can’t appear twice in the same row, column or region.

You’ll have to print this one on good old paper, but it’s great to get away from our screen every now and then, no?

Wave:♟️ Puzzles

Welcome to this week’s Via Waverly, where I expose 5 diverse and unexpected finds that were served to me by Waverly.

A 3D Sudoku

Imagine a Sudoku but on a strange Minecraft-like grid. I spent 30 minutes Saturday morning twisting my brain to solve this isodoku and loved it.

Wave:♟️ Puzzles

Feynman’s Burnout

“So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Richard Feynman

A short and uplifting excerpt from Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman and a reminder that creative people are never as prolific as when they play.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

Discovering Arlo Parks

I had heard her on the radio, but this piece in The Guardian convinced me to add Arlo Parks’ music to my playlist. Her words resonated particularly strongly with me:

“I found [a journal] from when I was 13 and it said: ‘I want to make music because I want to help people.’ When you approach the world with such vulnerability and openness, people return that energy. It’s draining, but it fills me with a purpose. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Arlo Parks

Wave: 👬 New Movements

Matrix Believers

I’m fascinated by the recent boom in conspiracy theories. Why are so many people suddenly believing the earth is flat or that airplanes are dropping chemtrails on us?

There’s one weird trend that, in my opinion, is bordering on conspiracy theory: the belief that we live in a simulation. The thing is that many very famous people believe in this.

This EnGadget article from February presents the documentary A Glitch in The Matrix that tries to understand why people believe in the so-called Simulation Theory. I should watch it.

Wave: 🧮 Math Geekiness

Emotionless Music

Looks like Spotify recently patented a technology that listens to the people in the room, guesses their emotion, and plays music that fits the mood. Pretty much the exact opposite of the intentional recommendation approach Waverly is going for (let alone the dubious privacy invasion). So, as you may guess, I’m not a fan.

I’m not alone. Hundreds of recording artists, human rights groups and academics have penned an open letter to the streaming service asking them never to do that. Found this in Vice.

Wave: ⚖️ Policies for People